Holiday Hours on Google: The Update Everyone Forgets

Why holiday hours cause so many bad reviews

Regular business hours on your Google Business Profile tell Google — and your customers — what to expect on a normal week. They don't account for Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year's, Fourth of July, or the weird half-days many businesses run around them.

Without an override, Google just shows your standard weekly hours on those dates. If your regular Tuesday hours say "9am–6pm" but you're actually closed for Christmas, Google tells searchers you're open. Customers don't know that. They just see "Open" on their phone, make the trip, and find a locked door.

That moment is exactly when a lot of 1-star reviews get written. The customer isn't rating your service — they're rating the fact that Google lied to them, and you're the one who gets the star rating. It's avoidable, and it's one of the cheapest reputation wins available to any local business.

It's also one of the few review-triggering mistakes that's entirely on the business, not the customer's expectations or a bad interaction with staff. There's no service recovery conversation that fixes "I drove here on a holiday because your hours said you were open." The damage is done before anyone says a word. That's exactly why this is worth treating as a seasonal task instead of something you remember to do only after the first angry review shows up.

Meet "Special Hours" in Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile has a feature built exactly for this called Special Hours. It lets you set different hours for a specific date — a holiday, a weather closure, an early-close day for staff training — separate from your regular weekly schedule. You're not editing your normal hours at all. You're just telling Google "on this one date, use these hours instead."

It's a small setting, but it's the difference between Google showing accurate information and Google guessing based on your default schedule. Once set, it automatically applies on that date and then disappears — no need to remember to undo it.

This also covers the cases people forget about: the half-day before a holiday, the day a staff member is out and you're running reduced hours, or a weather closure you know about in advance. Anything that deviates from your normal week, even by a couple of hours, is a candidate for a special-hours entry rather than leaving your regular schedule to speak for a day it doesn't apply to.

How to set Special Hours, step by step

1. Go to Google Business Profile. Search "my business" in Google while signed into the account that manages your listing, or go directly to business.google.com.
2. Select your business location. If you manage more than one, make sure you're editing the right one — this is a per-location setting.
3. Open the "Hours" section. You'll see your regular weekly hours listed here.
4. Find "Special hours." It's usually listed just below or alongside your regular hours editor.
5. Add the date. Pick the specific calendar date — Thanksgiving Day, December 24th, December 25th, January 1st, whichever applies.
6. Set the hours for that date, or mark it closed. If you're closing early on Christmas Eve, enter the adjusted hours. If you're closed all day, toggle "Closed."
7. Repeat for every date you need. Do this for each holiday or special closure coming up, not just the big one. Thanksgiving, the day after, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day usually all need their own entry.
8. Save and double-check. Search your business name on Google a day or two later and confirm the listing shows what you expect.

That's the whole process. No approval wait, no review queue — it updates on your public listing directly.

Don't stop at Google

Google is where most of your foot-traffic searches happen, but it's rarely the only place your hours are listed. Customers also check:

• Yelp
• Facebook Business Page
• Apple Maps / Apple Business Connect
• Bing Places
• Your own website's hours page or footer
• Any directory listing specific to your industry (home services directories, medical directories, restaurant aggregators)

If Google shows "Closed" but your website still says "Open until 8pm," you've just moved the confusion somewhere else instead of fixing it. The fastest way to find where your hours are inconsistent across the web is to run a Local SEO Audit — it's a free tool that checks your listing data and flags gaps like this before a customer finds them for you.

Getting every platform's hours to match your real holiday schedule is tedious if you do it manually, location by location, every season. This is exactly the kind of local-visibility upkeep that Tailwind's local SEO tooling is built to make less painful — keeping your listing data accurate across the places customers actually look.

Build the habit: a recurring reminder, twice a year

The real fix isn't a one-time update — it's a habit. Most businesses that get this wrong aren't lazy, they just forget. The solve is a recurring calendar reminder, set once, that keeps nagging you before it matters:

• Early November: a reminder to set special hours for Thanksgiving, the day after, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day — across Google and every other platform you're listed on.
• Early June: a reminder for summer closures — Fourth of July, Labor Day, any seasonal hour shifts, plus a sanity check that your spring updates didn't drift.

Set the reminder to repeat every year on the same dates, not as a one-off. Put the actual checklist in the reminder itself — "check Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, website" — so future-you doesn't have to reconstruct the list from memory while also running a business during the holidays.

If you manage multiple locations, this is where a spreadsheet earns its keep. One row per location, one column per platform, checked off as you confirm each one. It's unglamorous, but it's the difference between every location being accurate and one random store showing wrong hours while the rest look fine — which is often worse, because it looks like inconsistency rather than a simple oversight.

Put the reminder on the calendar of whoever actually owns the listings — not just the owner's personal calendar, where it competes with everything else going on in late November. If an agency or a marketing contractor manages your profiles, the reminder belongs on their schedule too, with a short note on which locations and which dates need checking.

What to do if you already missed one

If a customer already showed up to a locked door and left a review about it, don't panic and don't argue in the reply. Acknowledge the mix-up plainly, note that your holiday hours are now correctly listed, and move on. A short, honest response reads very differently from silence — and it shows the next person reading your reviews that you actually fix things when they go wrong.

Then go set the special hours for every remaining date on the calendar, so it doesn't happen again this season.

A ten-minute habit worth keeping

Holiday hours aren't complicated to fix. They're easy to forget. Set Special Hours in Google Business Profile for every closure and adjusted day, check that your other platforms and your own website agree with it, and put a recurring reminder on your calendar twice a year so this never depends on memory again. It's a small task that quietly prevents some of the most avoidable bad reviews a local business can get.