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How to check that a place will actually be open

This is the most valuable five minutes in trip planning and it is almost always done halfway. Most people read the hours on a map listing, see a green "open", and move on. That listing can be right about the week and wrong about your day.

Kate Sinha, founderUpdated 12 August 20265 min read

Four steps, in this order, because each one catches something the step before it cannot.

1. Go to the venue's own page, not the aggregator

Map listings, review sites and booking platforms all carry hours, and all of them are copies. They update when somebody remembers, and a small restaurant that changed its closing day in March may not have told any of them.

Find the place's own website, or failing that its own social account, which small venues often update long before anything else. If the two disagree, the venue is right. This is not a rare edge case. It is the normal condition of the internet in a town where somebody is running a kitchen rather than a web page.

2. Read the page in the local language

This is the step people skip, and it is where the expensive answers hide.

Annual closures, holiday weeks, seasonal changes and "shut for a refit until the eighteenth" are posted once, on the local-language version of the site, in the language of whoever wrote it. English pages on the same site are usually older and rarely carry the notice. Open the local version, let the browser translate it, and read the part that looks like an announcement.

A lunch spot that appears first on every list for one of the cruise ports we researched had closed permanently. Every article still recommended it. Its own page said so on the first line.

3. Check your date, not the pattern

"Open Tuesday to Sunday" is a pattern. Your trip happens on dates. Find the calendar, the opening times page or the booking widget, and look at the day you are going.

  • Seasonal hours. The same place runs to ten in July and to six in late September, and the change often lands mid-month rather than on the first.
  • Last entry. Closing time is not admission time. It is on the same page and it is usually thirty to sixty minutes earlier.
  • Parts of a place closing separately. A park can be open while the ride your child came for is listed as closed that day. Big attractions publish this per attraction, and nobody reads it until they are standing in front of it.
A card in a guide headed check this before you arrive, telling one family to check posted hours for their exact visit date and the tide table before a tide-pool stop.
The same check, handed to one family with the two things that move on their dates. From the San Diego guide, which is open to read.

4. Look at what is around the date

Public holidays, school terms and local festivals move opening hours in both directions, and a national holiday in the country you are visiting will not appear in your own calendar. Check whether your dates sit on or beside one, then re-read step three for anything that matters, because holiday hours are published as an exception rather than as a change to the normal pattern.

When there is no source

Sometimes there is no site, no calendar and no post since last year. Three honest options, and the third is the one we take:

  1. Call. Old fashioned, thirty seconds, definitive.
  2. Ask somebody who was there recently, and ask them when. A memory with a date on it is worth something. Without one it is a hope.
  3. Do not build the day around it. Put it second on the list, near something confirmed. If it is open you have a good morning. If it is shut you have not lost one.

How long this actually takes

About five minutes a place once you have done a few, and less for anything with a proper booking system. For a week with two or three things a day, that is an evening. It is the difference between a plan and a plan that survives contact with the week.

Two things worth doing while you spend it. Start with the anchors, the two or three things you would be genuinely sorry to miss, because if one of those is shut you want to know while the rest of the trip can still move. And write down where you checked and the date you checked it, so that when somebody asks on the morning you can look again in ten seconds instead of starting over.

This is the second of the four checks. The other nine things worth checking are on this list.

Or have it done for every place on your trip

Every place in a guide carries the source it was checked against, so you can confirm anything yourself on the morning it matters. Guides are $99, $179 or $299 depending on how many places you are staying. See the three tiers.