Holiday hours
Example: A neighborhood cafe sets a holiday-hours rule closing early at 3pm every Christmas Eve, so a customer searching "open today?" on December 24th gets the right answer from Google instead of showing up to a locked door at 8pm.
the recurring per-date overrides every restaurant has to make every year
The subset of special hours that recur on a calendar — closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, early-close on Christmas Eve, brunch-only on Mother's Day, extended hours for St. Patrick's Day. Distinct from one-off closures only in that they come back next year. Captured in Schema.org as specialOpeningHoursSpecification entries with validFrom/validThrough set to the holiday date.
Why it matters
The customer searching "is [restaurant] open today?" on Thanksgiving morning needs an authoritative answer. If your Google Business Profile or your site's JSON-LD still shows the standard schedule, the customer either takes the trip and finds you closed (negative review territory) or skips to the chain that bothered to post their holiday hours. Open Hours ships a holiday picker pre-populated with the dates that matter and produces an .ics calendar file with day-before alarms.
Frequently asked
What is holiday hours?
Holiday hours is the subset of special hours that recur on a calendar — closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, early-close on Christmas Eve, brunch-only on Mother's Day, extended hours for St. Patrick's Day. Distinct from one-off closures only in that they come back next year. Captured in Schema.org as specialOpeningHoursSpecification entries with validFrom/validThrough set to the holiday date.
Why does holiday hours matter for a restaurant?
The customer searching "is [restaurant] open today?" on Thanksgiving morning needs an authoritative answer. If your Google Business Profile or your site's JSON-LD still shows the standard schedule, the customer either takes the trip and finds you closed (negative review territory) or skips to the chain that bothered to post their holiday hours. Open Hours ships a holiday picker pre-populated with the dates that matter and produces an .ics calendar file with day-before alarms.
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