Opening hours online: the detail that loses guests

A family drives twenty minutes for Sunday lunch because the maps app says the restaurant is open until four. They arrive at half past two to find the kitchen closed since two and the doors locked by three. The website says something different again, and a directory site still shows the hours from before the venue stopped opening on Mondays. Nobody at the restaurant meant to mislead anyone. Opening hours online are a small detail, and when they are wrong, they lose guests in the most frustrating way possible.

Guests trust what they read online, especially in maps and search results. They plan journeys, book babysitters and choose between venues based on the hours they see. When those hours are wrong, the guest does not blame the app; they blame the restaurant. A guest turned away at a locked door rarely tries again.

This guide covers where a restaurant's hours appear online, the details that most often go wrong, such as holiday hours, kitchen hours and days you no longer open, how to keep every listing matching and who should check. Every venue and figure in it is an example.

For many guests, the opening hours they see in a search result or a maps app decide whether they come at all. A venue shown as "closed now" is skipped; one shown as "open until eleven" is considered. Hours are among the most viewed details of any restaurant listing.

Posting business hours is one of the oldest habits of any shop, and online it matters more than ever. That makes them one of the most valuable details to get right, and one of the most damaging to get wrong. A wrong menu disappoints; wrong hours send guests to a locked door or keep them away from an open one.

A restaurant's hours appear in more places than most owners realise: the website, the Google Business Profile, other maps apps, social media profiles, directory listings, booking platforms, review sites, delivery apps and the sign on the door. Each was set up at a different time, often by different people.

When the hours change, every one of those places needs updating. Most problems come from the ones that were forgotten: the directory listing nobody remembers creating, the social profile with last year's hours, the booking platform the venue stopped using but never closed.

The Google Business Profile is usually the most important place for opening hours, because so many guests see a venue first in a search or a maps app. Its hours appear directly in results, often with "open now" or "closes soon" beside them.

Keep it exact, including special hours for holidays, which the profile lets you set in advance. Our guide to your Google Business Profile is the real homepage covers the listing in detail.

Directory listings, on review sites, local guides, maps apps and booking platforms, often show opening hours too. Some were created by the venue; some were created automatically and never claimed. All of them can show the wrong hours.

Make a list of every directory listing you can find, claim the ones you can and keep their hours current. For listings you cannot control, make sure the main ones, especially the Google profile and your website, are right, because many directories copy from them.

On your website, put the hours on the find-us or contact page and in the footer of every page, as text rather than an image. Text can be read on any screen, updated in a minute and understood by search engines. Hours inside an image cannot.

Make them easy to read: each day on its own line, with lunch and dinner shown separately if the venue closes between services. Our guide to website pages in the order guests need them covers where the hours belong among the other website pages.

Many venues have two sets of hours: when the doors are open and when the kitchen takes orders. A restaurant open until eleven may stop serving food at half past nine. Showing only the door hours sends hungry guests who arrive at ten to a bar with no food.

Show both where they differ: "Open 12 to 11, kitchen until 9.30". On listings that only allow one set of hours, consider which matters more to your guests, and use the description or a note to mention the other.

One of the most common errors is a day the venue no longer opens, such as a Monday dropped after a quiet winter, still shown as open online. Guests arrive, find the doors shut and leave annoyed, often posting about it.

When you change which days you open, update every listing the same day, not when someone remembers. A change of opening days is exactly the kind of change that gets missed in one or two places and causes problems for months.

Holiday hours cause more wrong arrivals than almost anything else. Christmas, New Year, bank holidays and religious festivals often bring different hours, and if the listings still show normal hours, guests turn up to find the venue closed, or stay away when it is open.

Set holiday hours in advance on every listing that allows it, especially the Google profile. Announce them on the website and social media a week or two before. When the holiday is over, check that every listing has returned to normal hours.

Many venues change their hours with seasonal trade: longer hours in summer, shorter in winter, an extra lunch service in December, closed for a fortnight in January. Each change is a moment when the listings can fall out of step.

Plan seasonal changes into the calendar, with a note to update every listing when they start and when they end. Our guide to seasonal trade: mapping your own restaurant year covers how to see the year's changes coming.

Sometimes a venue closes unexpectedly: a burst pipe, a power cut, illness in the team, a refurbishment. Update the Google profile as soon as you can, mark the venue as temporarily closed or set special hours, and post a short notice on the website and social media.

When you reopen, reverse every change. A venue still marked as temporarily closed a week after reopening is losing guests who think it is shut.

Some venues run different services at different times: breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, a late bar menu. Guests looking for one service need to know when it runs, not just when the doors are open.

Where it matters, list the services and their times on the website: "Breakfast 8 to 11, lunch 12 to 3, dinner 6 to 10". Listings that only allow one set of hours can mention the services in their description.

Search engines can also read opening hours from structured data, a small block of code on the website describing the venue's details in a standard format. If your website has it, the hours there must match the visible hours and the Google profile.

Out-of-date hours in structured data can keep appearing in search long after the visible page has been corrected. Our guide to structured data for restaurants, done once covers how to check it.

The simplest way to keep hours right is to have one source of truth: a single place where the venue's current hours are written down, such as a shared document or a page in the operations file. Every listing is updated from it, and nobody changes hours anywhere without changing the source first.

When hours change, change the source, then work through every listing in a fixed order. It sounds bureaucratic, but it is the only reliable way to stop the website, the Google profile and the directories drifting apart.

Give one person the job of keeping hours right everywhere, with a backup. Without an owner, everyone assumes someone else updated the listings, and nobody did. The owner keeps the list of listings, updates them when hours change and checks them regularly.

Make it part of a routine, such as the monthly website check: every listing, on a phone, compared with the source of truth. It takes a little time and prevents a great deal of frustration.

Once a month, check the hours on every listing you know about: search for the venue on your phone, open the maps app, look at the website, the social profiles and the main directory sites. Compare each with the source of truth and fix any differences.

Check from a phone and as a guest would, not from the admin screens of each service. What matters is what guests see, and some listings show information differently from how it was entered.

Before any change of hours takes effect, such as a new closing day, a seasonal change or a holiday, make a short list of every place the hours appear and update them in one sitting. Then check them from a phone the next day.

It helps to make the change a week or two in advance where the listing allows it, so it takes effect automatically on the right date. That avoids the rush of updating everything on the morning the change begins.

However careful you are, some guests will arrive when the venue is closed. Make it easy for them: a sign on the door with the hours and a way to book, so a guest who arrives early or on a closed day can plan another visit rather than simply leaving.

A friendly sign with "Back tomorrow at 12, book a table at our website" turns a closed door into a future booking. A blank door turns it into a disappointed guest.

Guests sometimes mention that the hours online are wrong, in person, by message or in a review. Thank them, fix the listing at once and check every other listing at the same time, because if one is wrong, others may be too.

If a guest was turned away because of wrong hours, apologise and invite them back. It was the venue's mistake, and a sincere apology often turns an annoyed guest into a forgiving one.

If guests can book online, the booking page should only offer times when the venue is actually open and serving. A booking page that offers a table on a day the venue no longer opens, or after the kitchen closes, creates the worst kind of wrong arrival: a guest with a confirmed booking at a locked door.

Make sure the booking times match the opening hours, and change them together whenever the hours change. The booking page is often the most trusted source of hours a guest has, because it promises a specific table.

In a group, each venue has its own hours, and each needs its own listings kept right. A group website that shows one set of hours for all venues, or listings copied between venues, almost guarantees mistakes.

Keep a source of truth for each venue, and give each venue's manager responsibility for its listings. Check the group website shows each venue's own hours, clearly labelled.

Social media profiles often show opening hours too, sometimes in a dedicated field and sometimes in the bio. They are easy to forget when hours change, because nobody looks at their own profile's details very often.

Add every social profile to the list of places to update, and check the hours on each one during the monthly check. Guests who find you on social media often check the hours there before they visit.

Many venues have used more than one booking platform over the years, and the old listings often stay online with old hours, sometimes still taking bookings. Guests who find them may book a table at a time you are closed, or on a day you no longer open.

Search for the venue on the booking platforms you have used in the past, and close any old listings, or at least update them. A booking made through a forgotten platform is one of the most awkward surprises a host can have.

The sign on the door is the oldest place hours appear, and it should match the rest. Guests who walk past check it, and a sign with old hours, or one that differs from the website, undermines trust in both.

Update the door sign whenever the hours change, and add holiday hours to it a week or two ahead. A clear, current sign also helps guests who arrive when you are closed, by telling them when to come back.

Hours often appear in places nobody thinks of: the footer of marketing emails, the signature on the venue's emails, booking confirmation templates and printed receipts or menus. When hours change, these keep showing the old ones until someone updates them.

Add them to the list of places to check. An email signature with last year's hours, sent to a guest asking about a booking, is a small but avoidable confusion.

When hours change, especially a new closing day, tell your regulars directly, as well as updating the listings. A short note in an email to guests who opted in, a word at the table and a sign at the bar a few weeks ahead mean regulars are not caught out.

Regulars are the guests most likely to turn up on their usual day out of habit. A regular who arrives on a Monday you no longer open, after years of Monday dinners, deserves to have been told.

Guests walking past late in the evening want to know whether they can still eat. If the kitchen takes last orders at half past nine, say so on the door and online: "Kitchen open until 9.30". It saves guests walking in to be turned away, and saves staff the awkward conversation.

Be consistent about last orders. A venue that sometimes serves after its stated kitchen hours and sometimes does not confuses guests and staff alike. Choose a time, publish it and keep to it.

Some listings update hours at once; others take a day or more to show the change, and a few copy from other sources on their own schedule. That is another reason to make changes in advance where you can, especially for holidays and new closing days.

After updating, check each listing again a few days later, from a phone, to make sure the change has appeared. A change that never showed up is as bad as one never made.

An invented bistro stopped opening on Mondays in the autumn, but its Google profile, two directory sites and its website footer still showed Monday as open. Over the winter, several groups arrived on Mondays to find the doors locked, and one wrote a sharp review. The bistro's manager makes a list of every listing she can find and creates a single page of current hours as the source of truth.

She updates every listing in one sitting, adds kitchen hours to the website, sets the Christmas and New Year hours on the Google profile in November and adds a monthly check to her calendar. The Monday arrivals stop, the reviewer is thanked and invited back and the bistro's hours now match everywhere guests look.

In servearound, a venue's shifts, its service periods such as lunch and dinner, set the times guests can book online and the opening hours the booking page tells search engines in its structured data, so changing a shift's days or times changes both. Each shift can carry schedules with their own days and times, and a period switched off is left out.

servearound does not update your Google listing, your website or directory sites, so those hours are changed by hand, and there is no setting for one-off closures or holiday hours, so a closed day is handled by switching booking off for that period, or by turning off public booking until you reopen. See the reservations module.

Everywhere guests look: the website, the Google profile, maps apps, social profiles, directories, booking platforms and the door.

Usually the Google Business Profile, because many guests see it first.

Yes, where they differ from the door hours.

Set them in advance where listings allow it, announce them and reverse them afterwards.

One place where the current hours are written down, from which every listing is updated.

One named person, with a backup, checking monthly.

Thank them, fix the listing and check every other listing too.

Always. It should only offer times when the venue is open and serving.

Opening hours online are a small detail that loses guests when it is wrong. Hours appear on the website, the Google Business Profile, maps apps, social media, directory listings, booking platforms and the door, and every one must match. The most common errors are days you no longer open, holiday hours never set or never reversed and kitchen hours that differ from the door hours.

Keep one source of truth for the current hours, update every listing from it in one sitting whenever hours change, set holiday and seasonal changes in advance and make one person responsible, with a monthly check from a phone. Make sure the booking page only offers times when you are open, and put a friendly sign on the door for guests who arrive when you are not.