How to Set Vacation Hours on Your Google Business Profile? Step-by-Step Guide

Regularly updating information on your Google Business Profile is a simple way to build credibility and increase local visibility. This is helped by the custom hours feature, which allows you to communicate business closures, including vacations. This way you avoid misunderstandings, and your customers won’t waste time coming to a closed business. See how to properly set vacation information on your Google Business Profile and what to watch out for.

Why is it worth informing customers about business vacation?

Informing about vacation is an important practice that affects your brand perception and the comfort of people using your products or services.

• Transparent communication builds trust, shows professionalism and care for your audience.
• It also helps avoid misunderstandings and situations where customers come to closed doors.
• Transparency also minimizes conversion losses, because potential customers immediately see when the business is closed. Thanks to this, they can plan contact or a visit at another time, instead of completely giving up on the services.
• Informing about vacation on your Google Business Profile strengthens local visibility. Google rewards businesses that maintain the accuracy of shared information.
• Custom opening hours on your Google Business Profile are displayed directly in Google Maps and search. This improves user experience and the profile’s position in local search results.

See what Google Business Profile positioning and optimization looks like.

How to set custom opening hours on your Google Business Profile?

Owners and managers of Google Business Profiles can independently add custom business opening hours, e.g. during vacation, holidays, special events or other exceptional situations. This feature allows you to mark days when the business operates shorter hours, different hours, or is closed for a maximum of 6 consecutive days. The entire process is simple and comes down to just a few steps (https://support.google.com/business/answer/6303076?hl=pl).

1. Open your Google Business Profile.
2. Click Edit profile, then Opening hours.

3. Click the pencil icon next to Custom opening hours.

4. Select a date and:
   1. click Check to confirm the suggested date;
   2. click Add date and enter a specific date to set a custom date.

5. Update opening hours:
   1. if the business is open on that day, uncheck the Closed box and enter opening hours;
   2. if the business is closed on that day, check the Closed box;

   

   3. if you want to enter several different opening hours for one date, click + and enter a specific time range;

   

   

   4. if you want to delete custom opening hours, click the trash icon next to the date (closed business).

   

6. Click Save to update the information.

How to set custom opening hours on Google Business Profile for multiple locations?

If you manage multiple locations within one Profile, you can:

• use Google Business Profile Manager – enables bulk editing of information, including custom opening hours for multiple locations at once. To do this, you need to use an .xls file. The second option is to implement custom hours on one of the locations – then a pop-up will appear asking if we want to introduce such opening hours on the remaining profiles connected to the Manager;
• use the growAp application – this tool supports mass configuration of Google Business Profile, including import from spreadsheets, central data management and updates for multiple profiles at once. The application optimizes opening hours and other data, saving time with large location portfolios.

Can you automatically set business closure information for several days in a row?

Currently Google does not allow setting business closure as a single date range – each date must be marked separately (https://support.google.com/business/thread/26519024/urlop-a-niestandardowe-godziny-pracy-czy-da-rad%C4%99-to-zmieni%C4%87-pro%C5%9Bciej?hl=pl).

• For a longer vacation, this means manually indicating consecutive days and setting the status to Closed.
• This is the best approach if, for example, you’re planning a longer renovation of the premises and it won’t be available to customers. You set the Profile status to Temporarily closed, and in posts and social media communication you inform customers when the location will be open again.
• However, Google encourages submitting suggestions for improvements. The more users report the need to introduce range date selection, the greater the chance that the feature will appear in the future.

Check out how to effectively manage multiple Google Business Profiles.

Vacation and Google Business Profile – best practices

Proper preparation of your Google Business Profile before vacation allows you to maintain business credibility and provides customers with clarity about the availability of your services. The following tips can help you with this.

1. Plan ahead – set custom opening hours 1-2 weeks in advance so that changes have time to appear in Google Maps and search. This will also give customers time to plan a visit before or after the vacation.
2. Take care of customer communication – add a post on your Google Business Profile with information about the planned vacation. Also update the business description and add appropriate attributes on your Google Business Profile, e.g. Closed for holidays. You can also introduce alternative forms of contact during vacation if they will be available at that time.
3. Use automation and reminders – if you manage multiple locations, use tools like growAp for faster implementation of changes. Set reminders in your calendar to introduce custom opening hours just before the vacation date.
4. Check the correctness of changes after publication – after about 24 hours, verify in incognito mode whether the profile correctly displays new hours and messages. Make sure changes are visible in both Google Maps and search results. However, if you set custom hours well in advance, Google won’t show them to you. On the profile you will only see the location’s opening hours for the next 7 days.

Most common mistakes when setting custom opening hours on Google Business Profile

When configuring custom opening hours on your Google Business Profile, you should watch out for minor errors that can negatively affect your business image and customer experience.

• Introducing changes too late – customers may come to the business at the wrong time, seeing outdated opening hours.
• Lack of communication with the team – without internal communication, employees may give customers incorrect business opening hours.
• Poor customer communication – lack of posts on the Profile, social media posts or additional messages, e.g. on the website, about staff and business unavailability can weaken customer relationships.
• Incorrect date configuration – mistakes when selecting dates can cause hours to be displayed incorrectly and create confusion.

How to set vacation on your Google Business Profile? Summary

Custom opening hours on your Google Business Profile are an irreplaceable tool that allows for efficient management of your business availability, especially during vacations or exceptional business closures. Remember to plan changes in advance, inform customers through various channels and regularly check that data is current. Thanks to this, you will maintain high communication quality and minimize the risk of misunderstandings.