Christmas opening hours: the week customers check
Searches for opening hours run at roughly five times their usual level in the week beginning Monday 21 December. It is the heaviest week of the year for that one question, it is finished within a fortnight, and nothing published after it counts for anything. If you do a single piece of admin in December, do this one.
The seven dates people look up
- Christmas Eve, and what time the kitchen stops
- Christmas Day, whether you are open at all
- Boxing Day
- 27 to 30 December, the week nobody knows what anybody is doing
- New Year's Eve, and whether it is ticketed
- New Year's Day
- The first normal day back
Answer all seven, even the ones where nothing changes. "Open as usual" is an answer, and it is the answer that stops somebody ringing you on Boxing Day morning to ask.
Where they have to go
- Google Business Profile, under Special hours. The most important one by a distance. Set every date, and look at it again on the morning of Christmas Eve.
- Facebook, in the About section as well as a post. A post scrolls away in three days. The About section does not.
- Your own website, somewhere a person can find in one tap from the front page.
- The door. A printed sheet taped inside the glass is still the last thing somebody checks at eight o'clock on Boxing Day, and it is the only one that works when their phone is flat.
Why the hours you set do not always stay set
Google accepts suggested edits from the public and infers hours from other places your pub appears online. A customer who found you closed on a quiet afternoon can suggest that you close at that time, and it can go live without you being asked. This is the usual reason a publican is told, always by a regular and always at the worst moment, that Google says they are shut.
There is no way to switch that off. The defence is to check, and the week before Christmas is the week to do it, because that is the week the largest number of people are looking.
Setting them once
clockapub is one dashboard where a UK pub keeps its opening hours, kitchen times, events and offers, and sends them to its finder page, the screen in the pub, and Google and Facebook posts.
Special dates are the part that matters here. You put the seven dates in once, with the kitchen times against each, and your finder page and the screen in your pub are right from the moment you save. The Google and Facebook posts telling people are drafted from the same change and go out with one tap.
It does not fix your Google hours for you, and we say so plainly below. It does mean the seven answers exist in one place you can read out over the phone, instead of in five places that disagree with each other.
Free for every UK pub through 2026.
Before December, there is the other half of this
Christmas is two separate jobs a month apart. The hours are the December one. The menu is the September and October one, and it is the bigger of the two. Putting your Christmas menu everywhere covers it.