Special Hours on Google: Planning Holidays Properly
Set special hours in your Google Business Profile, use seasonal posts, and plan the whole restaurant year with a simple, repeatable calendar
23 December, a guest searches on their phone for somewhere open over the holidays. Your profile appears, but shows only your regular opening hours, along with Google’s note that hours may differ on holidays. The guest moves on to the next result, the one that confirmed its holiday hours. They never find out you would have been open.
Seasonal visibility is decided in the weeks before December, not during it. And it consists of more than opening hours: posts, menu, and attributes together tell guests whether your restaurant matches the season, or whether your profile stopped updating last summer.
Why Google behaves differently on holidays
On ordinary days, your stored opening hours are enough. On public holidays, Google treats them as uncertain until you actively confirm them. To a guest, that reads as a question mark rather than an invitation.
Google explicitly recommends in its own help pages that you confirm opening hours for public holidays, even when they do not differ from your regular hours. That is exactly what special hours in the profile are for.
An unconfirmed holiday reads to a guest as an open question. And nobody resolves open questions with a phone call when three alternatives below are unambiguous.
(Source: Set special hours, Google Business Profile Help)
Setting special hours in your Google Business Profile
The path is short, it is simply rarely used:
- Open your Google Business Profile
- Select Edit profile, then Opening hours
- Click Edit next to Special hours
- Choose a date, either from Google’s suggestions or a custom one
- Enter the different hours or mark the day as Closed
- Save
Google suggests upcoming public holidays on its own, so you do not have to look them up. What Google does not prescribe is the right timing.
Our practical rule: at least a week ahead, ideally alongside the staff roster. Entering 24 December at 10pm on 23 December means the guests who researched two days earlier are long gone. The rest of the profile groundwork is in our Google Business Profile checklist for restaurants.
Seasonal posts: event, offer, or update
Google offers three post types for seasonal occasions, and they differ in what they can do:
- Event for anything with a fixed date, such as a New Year’s Eve menu, an Advent brunch, or a wine tasting. Title plus start and end dates with times are mandatory. Without a time, Google displays the event as all-day.
- Offer for time-limited promotions, such as a fixed-price Christmas menu. This adds a coupon code, link, and terms, and the “View offer” button is set automatically.
- Update for everything else, such as noting that game season starts in November.
One limitation belongs here, because leaving it out creates false expectations: seasonal posts do not improve your ranking. A controlled nine-week test by Sterling Sky found no measurable effect of posts on local pack position, with an average click-through rate of 0.5 per cent. Posts work on guests who already opened your profile, not on the question of who gets found in the first place. Why they are still worth doing is covered in our article on Google Business posts for restaurants.
(Source: Create and manage posts, Google Business Profile Help)
Making seasonal menus visible
The menu in your profile is where seasonality goes stale fastest. A game menu still showing in March, or a Christmas menu nobody can order in February, is not a minor detail.
An expired seasonal menu says more about your profile upkeep than about your kitchen. Guests read it as a signal for how current the rest of your information is, opening hours included.
The effort is manageable now that menus can be generated from a photo or PDF, the process is covered in our article on creating your Google Business Profile menu with AI. The same applies to photos: a terrace shot as your lead profile image in December sets an expectation the evening cannot meet.
The seasonal calendar for the restaurant year
Seasonal visibility can be planned rather than chased. This rhythm covers the year:
| Period | What is due |
|---|---|
| September, October | Christmas party enquiries begin. Clarify group capacity and the booking route in your profile |
| November | Enter holiday hours for December and January, set the Christmas or Advent menu as a post |
| December | Check individual days, 24, 25, 26, 31 and 1 often have different hours. New Year’s Eve as its own event |
| January | Temporary closures as special hours with status closed, remove expired Christmas posts and menus |
| Spring | Activate terrace and outdoor seating attributes, switch photos to the warmer season |
| Summer | Enter holiday periods, shortened kitchen hours, and closures ahead of time |
December in particular is worth a look at your booking route, because enquiries arrive in a cluster and a missing booking option costs revenue directly. How to offer reservations through Google is covered in our article on table reservations via Google Maps.
Common mistakes with seasonal visibility
Entered too late. The most common case, and the most avoidable. Guest research happens days before the visit, not on the day itself.
Temporary closures handled wrongly. Setting the profile to permanently closed for two weeks uses a status meant for businesses that no longer exist. The correct route is special hours with status closed for the affected dates.
Posts expire unnoticed. An event post ends with its end date. If nothing follows it, the profile looks emptier in January than it did in December.
Attributes stay on all year. An active terrace attribute in January brings guests in through a filter you cannot serve right now. Which attributes exist and how they work is covered in our article on Google Business attributes.
Individual holidays get missed. 26 December and 1 January regularly slip through, because they are long settled in the staff roster and therefore forgotten in the profile.
The bottom line
Seasonal visibility is not a campaign topic, it is profile upkeep with a calendar: confirm holiday hours before guests search, adapt posts and menus to the season, and remove expired content afterwards. That recurring upkeep is part of what SupaPresence checks, from incomplete profile data to content that no longer matches the season, so the work does not pile up every December at once. Join the pilot for free.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I set special hours in my Google Business Profile?
Open your Google Business Profile, go to “Edit profile” and then “Opening hours”. You will find the “Special hours” section there. Pick the date, enter the different hours or mark the day as closed, and save.
How far in advance should I set holiday hours?
At least a week before the date, ideally when you plan the staff roster. Guests research holiday visits days in advance, so a profile updated the evening before no longer reaches exactly those guests.
Do I need to set holiday hours if they don’t change?
Google explicitly recommends it. Confirmed holiday hours show guests the information is accurate. Without confirmation, Google displays a note that hours may differ, and that note is what costs you visits.
Do seasonal Google posts improve rankings?
No. A controlled test by Sterling Sky found no measurable effect of posts on local pack rankings. Posts are an information and attention tool for guests already viewing your profile, not a ranking lever.
How do I handle a temporary closure for holidays?
As special hours with the status “closed” for the affected dates. Do not set the profile to “permanently closed”, that status is meant for businesses that no longer exist and damages your visibility unnecessarily.