Festive opening hours: make your website, Google and agent agree

It's 23 December and a customer messages you on WhatsApp, slightly annoyed. Google says you're open until eight tonight, your website says two o'clock, and the assistant on your WhatsApp has just told her that "our usual hours are 9am to 8pm". All three are yours, and none of them is exactly wrong. Each one was simply updated (or not) at a different time.

This piece is for you if you run a business with opening hours and they change over the festive season: closing early on the 24th, shut on the 25th and the 1st, shorter days between Christmas and New Year, or an extra Sunday for shoppers. By the end you'll have an afternoon's method to make every place that shows your hours say exactly the same thing, and to stop your AI agent from making anything up.

Why December is when it all drifts apart

For most of the year, opening hours look after themselves because they don't change. You wrote them once on the website, on Google, in your Instagram bio and in your agent's instructions, and that was that. December breaks this in three ways at once: the hours change on several days in a row, they change differently each day, and those are exactly the weeks when people ask "are you open tomorrow?" the most.

The usual mistake isn't forgetting everything. It's updating two places out of five. You change the website because it's the first thing that comes to mind, stick a sign on the door and assume the rest will sort itself out. But plenty of people never visit your website: they search your name on Google Maps, look at what it says and turn up. Or they message you and trust whatever answer comes back, whether it's from a person or an agent.

This year the calendar makes it trickier. The 24th and the 31st are Thursdays, and the 25th and the 1st are Fridays. That's two long weekends in a row where customers won't know whether you're open on the Saturday. If you don't tell them, they'll guess.

Step 1: one sheet with your festive hours

Before you touch anything, write the special hours down in a single place. A spreadsheet or a note is fine. What matters is that it becomes the source, and everything else is copied from it, never the other way round.

Give it one row per day, from the first unusual day to the last, including the ones that are normal. For example:

• Thursday 24 December: 9am to 2pm.
• Friday 25: closed.
• Saturday 26: usual Saturday hours.
• Thursday 31: 9am to 2pm.
• Friday 1 January: closed.
• Tuesday 5: open late until 9pm.
• Wednesday 6: closed (a public holiday in Spain).

Include the days that don't change but that people will wonder about, like that Saturday the 26th. "Usual hours" is just as useful as "closed", because it answers the question before anyone asks it.

Then add two columns almost nobody bothers with: which services change ("no home delivery 24–26 December", "no evening appointments that week") and who's on call if something comes up. That's what your agent will need later.

Watch out for local and regional bank holidays, which vary by area. If your town has one on the 26th, it goes on the sheet just like the 25th.

Step 2: Google comes first

For many businesses, Google Maps is where the most people check opening hours, and it has a feature built for exactly this: special hours on your Business Profile. You set them under Edit profile → Hours → Special hours, and for each date you can enter different hours or tick "Closed" (Google's help page walks through it).

Three details worth knowing:

• Special hours are meant for changes of up to six days in a row. If you're closing for a week or more, Google says to mark the business as "temporarily closed" instead.
• Google recommends confirming your hours for official holidays even if you're open as normal. If it suggests dates, review and confirm them, so people searching can see the information is current.
• For special hours to show, your regular hours need to be set (what Google calls "open with main hours").

Do it a couple of weeks ahead. Not because Google is slow, but because by mid-December you won't remember.

Step 3: website, social and automatic replies

With the sheet in front of you, work through everything else in this order:

1. Your website. If your hours sit in the footer, add a line at the top of the page for those weeks pointing to the festive hours. Don't remove your normal hours; just make it obvious which applies on which day.
2. Your WhatsApp Business away message and your email auto-reply. These are the easiest to forget and the most damaging, because they keep answering on their own with stale information.
3. Your phone voicemail, if you have one. Fifteen seconds listing the closed dates is plenty.
4. Instagram or Facebook. A pinned post and a highlighted story with the hours. Keep it a plain image, not a designed poster, so it reads well on a phone.
5. The sign on the door, copied from the same sheet rather than written from memory.

One small habit helps everywhere: write the weekday next to every date ("Friday 25th"). Nobody misreads the month, and it forces you to double-check you've got the right day.

Step 4: what your agent needs to know

If an agent answers on WhatsApp or your website, this is where things go wrong most easily. It usually has your regular hours baked into its instructions, and it will repeat them with complete confidence.

What works is handing it the sheet as it is, not a summary, plus a few explicit rules:

• If the date asked about is on the sheet, the sheet wins. Always over the regular hours.
• If the date isn't on the sheet, it doesn't guess. It gives the usual hours and adds that bank holidays are worth confirming, or it passes the conversation to a person.
• No promising services that change on those days. If deliveries stop from the 24th to the 26th, it says so clearly before accepting an order for Christmas Day.
• An expiry date. From 7 January the sheet no longer applies. Unless you tell it, it may still be warning people in February that "we're closed on the 6th".

Before you leave it running, ask it the questions customers actually send, in the way they write them: "open on the 26th?", "are you there tomorrow afternoon?" (sent on the 23rd, to check it understands what "tomorrow" means), "any service on the 6th?". When an answer is wrong, the fix is almost always in the sheet or the rules, not the agent.

When all this isn't worth it

If you only close on the 25th and the 1st and open as normal the rest of the time, you don't need a fifteen-row sheet. Add those two dates as special hours on Google, update your away message and get on with your day.

It also makes no sense if you haven't decided yet. Publishing certain hours late beats publishing early and changing them, because every change means going through all five places again, and one always gets left behind. If you're unsure about a particular day, mark it "to be confirmed" on the sheet and let the agent say exactly that.

And a final word: no tool saves you from checking. On the 22nd or 23rd, search for your business on Google from your phone, open your website and message yourself on WhatsApp from another number. It takes five minutes and it's the only way to see what your customers see.

Keep the sheet for next time

Hang on to it. You'll need it again at Easter, in August and next Christmas, and the second time it takes ten minutes to fill in. Festive hours aren't hard. Getting them to say the same thing everywhere is.

If you'd like those "are you open tomorrow?" messages answered on their own, correctly, with the hours you've decided, that's exactly what our receptionist agent does: it answers from your sheet and hands you anything that isn't on it.