Opening hours, holidays, closures — how to get your hours right everywhere

Your business's name and address rarely change. Your opening hours change several times a year: public holidays, annual closures, summer and winter hours, the shoulder season. Every one of those changes is a moment when your details can drift apart — your website already shows the new hours, your Google profile still the old ones, the tourism portal something from two years ago.

This post shows how to keep them in line: what your website passes on as data, what only as a note, what you have to manage at Google yourself — and a routine that stays the same for every change.

Why conflicting hours hurt.

Conflicting opening hours hurt because search engines and AI assistants piece together the details about your business from several sources, and when those sources disagree, they can't tell which one to trust. At worst they give out the wrong hours — with complete confidence. How a single outdated listing can become the majority view online is explained in the post on the NAP error.

With opening hours, the error cuts both ways. If a source says you're open when you're closed, a customer stands at a locked door and gets annoyed. If it says you're closed when you're open, nobody gets annoyed: the customer simply goes elsewhere, and you never find out. The second case costs more, precisely because nobody notices it.

One source for your website.

The foundation is a single place where you maintain your hours and from which everything else on your website reads. In btlabs Core you enter your weekly hours once: for each day of the week, with several time slots if you need them — a lunch break, say — and rest days explicitly marked as closed.

This source feeds:

• the pages where you show your hours — via a placeholder, on your contact page for example,
• the structured data, the machine-readable description of your business according to Schema.org that search engines evaluate,
• the llms.txt — a text file that sums up the key facts about your business for AI systems — and your business's other machine profiles.

Change a time and it changes everywhere it's read from this source. Make sure your hours are also visible on your website: Google's structured data guidelines say to mark up only what visitors can actually see.

What travels as data — and what only as a note.

Not every time detail takes the same route in btlabs Core: weekly hours travel as data, exceptions such as public holidays and annual closures as a note. The difference determines who can read the information.

As data, your regular weekly hours travel — which day, from when to when, including a lunch break. They appear in your website's structured data, in the files for AI assistants and on the pages where you insert them.

As a note, the exceptions travel: a short text such as "Closed for holidays 10–23 August" or "Closed on public holidays, other times by appointment". The note appears in the files for AI assistants and, where you include it via a placeholder, on the page. It does not appear in the structured data for search engines.

Two things follow from this:

• Weekly hours have no date. They apply until you change them. If you have summer and winter hours, you switch them when the season changes.
• Special hours for Google belong in your Google Business Profile. Your website gives search engines your regular hours; you enter individual exception days at Google.

What you manage in your Google Business Profile.

You manage your Google Business Profile at Google yourself; btlabs Core doesn't access it or fill it in. The map in Google Search and Google Maps show the details from this profile, not from your website. In its tips on local ranking, Google advises keeping your hours up to date there — including special hours for holidays.

The profile offers three settings for this:

• Regular hours — the same as on your website, day by day.
• Special hours for individual days: public holidays, annual closures, a late-opening Saturday before Christmas.
• Temporarily closed for longer breaks, during a renovation for example.

The same goes for every other listing: tourism portal, booking platform, industry directory, social media profile. No website can update them for you. Realistically, that means: pick the two or three listings that actually bring you guests and enquiries, and keep those current. Check the rest once a year.

South Tyrol: seasons, holidays, three languages.

In South Tyrol, the exception is often the rule. A hotel with a shoulder-season break, a mountain hut that closes in autumn, a farm tavern that opens for Törggelen, a ski rental shop: for a seasonal business like these, hours don't change once a year but with every season. Three habits help.

Announce the change, switch on the day. Because weekly hours have no date, they stop being accurate as soon as you switch them early. So announce the change in the note — "Winter hours from 3 November" — and switch the weekly hours on the day of the change. In your Google profile, on the other hand, you can enter individual exception days as special hours in advance.

Put a date in every note. "Currently closed" quietly turns false the moment you reopen. "Closed for holidays 10–23 August" stays clear — and once the date has passed, you delete it.

Keep the note in every language. Guests from Germany, Austria or Switzerland have different public holidays in mind than you do, and many ask in English. In btlabs Core you maintain the note per language — write it in all three, not just your own.

The routine for every change.

Public holiday, annual closure or change of season: the same five steps, in the same order.

1. Website first. Change weekly hours or the note in btlabs Core — one place, and everything your website publishes follows.
2. Google Business Profile. Regular hours or special hours, with the same details as on your website.
3. The other listings that matter. The two or three portals and directories that actually bring you enquiries.
4. Give the note an end date. Put the date in the text and delete the note once it has passed.
5. Cross-check. A few days later, ask an AI assistant and Google Search when you're open. What such a self-test looks like is described in Ask your AI.

What Google and the assistants pick up, and when, is their decision. The cross-check only tells you whether an old version is still hanging around somewhere — and where you need to follow up.

What btlabs Core takes care of — and what it doesn't.

btlabs Core takes care of your website: one source for your hours, weekly hours as structured data and the note on exceptions in the files for AI assistants, maintainable per language. It doesn't take care of your Google Business Profile or third-party directories; you update those where they live. And it doesn't promise that Google or an AI will show your hours that way — that's their call. What's in your hands: that your own website gives the same hours everywhere.

How address, service area and opening hours come together in btlabs Core is shown on the Local visibility page.