Why Did a Plumbing Company Get One-Star Reviews Over Google Business Profile Holiday Hours It Never Set?

The call came in the second week of October. A plumbing company owner, two trucks and four people on payroll, wanted to talk about his reviews. He had a 4.8 average and a little over sixty reviews, and two of the three newest negative ones said nearly the same thing: “Google said they were open. Nobody answered.” Both were from last holiday season. Neither had a reply. When we pulled up his profile, the cause was obvious. He had never set Google Business Profile holiday hours, so for every day his shop was dark between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, Google told searchers the same thing it said on a normal Tuesday: open until 5.

He thought it was a review problem. It was an hours problem that turned into a review problem. That difference shaped everything we did over the next hour on the phone.

What the listing said while the shop was dark

The owner keeps a simple schedule. Closed Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after. Closed from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day so the crew gets real time off. Emergencies were supposed to go to his cell, but the number on the profile was the office line, and the office line went to a voicemail that had not been updated since spring.

Here is how last season lined up when we laid his calendar next to what Google was showing:

Eleven calls on the 26th is not a disaster for a shop his size. What hurt was that the people calling had no way to know he was closed. They saw “Open,” they called, and nobody picked up. From their side, it looked like a business that does not answer the phone. Two of them said so in public, and those reviews sat at the top of his profile for most of the winter.

Google’s own guidance is plain about this. The Business Profile rules ask owners to represent the business accurately, and Google’s help page on special hours suggests confirming your hours for official holidays even when they match your normal schedule, so searchers can see the hours were checked. He had done neither. Nothing about it was malicious. He just did not know the setting existed, and the holiday weeks are exactly when owners are least likely to be thinking about their listing.

The fix he was about to make

Before he called us, the owner had already opened his profile and found the option he thought he needed. He was going to mark the business “Temporarily closed” from December 24 through January 1, then flip it back. It felt like the honest answer. Nine days closed, so say closed.

This is the misconception we run into most often with holiday scheduling, and it is an understandable one. Google offers two different tools here, and they do different things. Special hours are for short changes. Google’s help documentation says to use them when a business adjusts its hours or stays closed for up to six days in a row. Temporarily closed is for longer stretches: Google’s page on closing a business says to use it when you will be closed for more than seven days, closed for an off-season, or closed with no set return date.

The part most owners never read is the tip at the bottom of that same page. Google says that for broad queries, temporarily closed businesses can rank after open businesses, and that the effect depends on the category, the type of search, and how many similar businesses are also closed. For a plumber, the broad query is the whole game. Nobody searches the company name when a pipe splits at 6 AM. They search “plumber near me” and call whoever shows up first with a phone number.

So the question on the table was not “how do I tell Google I’m closed.” It was “how much of the year-end week am I willing to disappear from the map pack, and is that worth it.”

Laying the three options side by side

We walked through it on the call. This is roughly how the options lined up for his shop:

He did not love the third row. The whole point of closing the last week of December was that nobody worked. But he also admitted that the week after Christmas is when his phone does its best business in a cold year, between frozen lines, overloaded drains from houses full of guests, and water heaters that give out under the extra load. Closing his doors that week was a choice he could live with. Vanishing from the broad searches for it was a different thing.

What he actually set

The compromise was small. One technician, rotating with the owner, agreed to answer emergency calls from 8 AM to noon on December 27 and December 30. That broke the nine-day closure into two stretches, each under a week, which kept him inside the range Google’s special hours were built for. The schedule was real. Someone would pick up. That matters, because the point of setting holiday hours is to tell the truth, not to keep a green “Open” label on a dark shop.

From the profile’s Hours section, he added special hours for each date: Thanksgiving closed, the Friday after closed, December 24 through 26 closed, the 27th open 8 to 12, the 28th and 29th closed, the 30th open 8 to 12, and December 31 and January 1 closed. He also confirmed his normal hours for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, since that is a date Google often suggests and he planned to work it. Special hours sit on top of the regular weekly schedule, so nothing had to be changed back in January.

We also changed two things that were not technically about hours. The office voicemail got a new greeting with the holiday schedule and the on-call number. And we added a short Google post in mid-November listing the holiday dates in plain words, the same way he would write them on a sign in the window. If you want a deeper look at the rest of the profile, the full list of what we check sits on our Google Business Profile cleanup page.

One more piece came up because he shares profile access with his office manager. Holiday hours tend to fall through the cracks when only one person can edit the listing and that person is on vacation. He added her as a manager that afternoon, using the steps in our walkthrough on how to add someone as an admin to a Google Business Profile.

Answering the two reviews from last year

The reviews were still sitting there, unanswered, eleven months later. His first instinct was to explain that Google got the hours wrong. We suggested a different approach. Google did not get the hours wrong. Google showed exactly what the profile said. The honest reply was to own that.

The reply he posted to the burst pipe review said, in his own words, that the shop had been closed that week, that the listing should have said so and did not, that the customer had a bad morning because of it, and that the holiday schedule and emergency line are now posted. No discount offer, no defensive tone, no paragraph about how hard the season is on small businesses.

There is a reason to bother with a reply this late. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer review survey found that 80% of consumers say they are likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews, and that templated or generic responses make half of consumers unlikely to choose a business. The same survey found that 74% only care about reviews from the last three months. So the old reviews matter less every month, but an unanswered complaint sitting near the top of the list still reads as silence. Google notifies the reviewer when the owner replies, and the reply shows publicly under the review. We have a longer piece on the other side of this, how small businesses get more Google reviews, which is the slower, better way to push old complaints down the page.

What owners usually ask at this point

Almost every owner we walk through this asks whether setting holiday hours will hurt their rankings. It does not, as far as Google has ever said. Special hours are a normal, expected part of a profile. The ranking note Google publishes is about the “Temporarily closed” status, not about special hours.

The second question is usually, “Can I just leave it open and let the calls go to voicemail?” You can. That is what this owner did last year. The listing is not punished for it, but the people calling form their own opinion, and some of them write it down. Google’s representation guidelines exist mostly to protect searchers from exactly that experience.

Third, people ask whether they need to set special hours for holidays when they are open normal hours. Google’s help page suggests confirming those dates anyway so searchers can see the hours were checked. It takes a minute per date.

And service businesses often ask whether “More hours” is a better fit, since it lets you list separate schedules for specific services. Google describes More hours as a way to show different times for things like delivery or pickup, set as a subset of your main hours. It is useful for some categories, but it is not a substitute for holiday dates. For a plumber with an on-call morning, plain special hours on those specific dates did the job.

What changed when the season came back around

We are writing this in October, so the real test is still ahead of him. What we can say is what changed on paper. Every date between Thanksgiving and New Year’s now has a specific entry. The two one-star reviews have calm, specific replies under them. The voicemail matches the profile. Two people can edit the listing. And the owner gave up two half days of his crew’s vacation to stay a normal, open listing during the week his phone usually rings the most.

He was not thrilled about the half days. That tradeoff is the honest part of this story. If your business genuinely shuts down for two weeks and there is nobody to answer the phone, “Temporarily closed” is the correct setting, and accepting a dip in broad searches is the price of an accurate listing. If you can staff even a short window, the math usually favors breaking the closure into shorter stretches and setting exact Google Business Profile holiday hours for each date.

The bigger lesson for us was how small the gap was. One setting, never touched, cost a well-reviewed shop two public complaints and a winter of looking like a company that does not pick up. The profile is often the first thing a customer sees, and during the holidays it is the only thing they see. Setting Google Business Profile holiday hours before Thanksgiving is one of the few marketing tasks that takes ten minutes and closes off a specific, predictable problem. It fits alongside the rest of the local work we do on our SEO services page.

If you want a second set of eyes on your profile before the holidays, you can reach out here.

Sources

1. How to set Special hours, Google Business Profile Help
2. Mark your business as closed, Google Business Profile Help
3. How to set More hours, Google Business Profile Help
4. Guidelines for representing your business on Google, Google Business Profile Help
5. Manage customer reviews, Google Business Profile Help
6. Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, BrightLocal