Help your customers plan their visit by always keeping your working hours accurate! Learn how to update the hours on your website, and prevent bad customer experiences and negative reviews!
Contents:
The Importance of Accurate Working Hours
Operating vs. Descriptive Hours
Setting/Changing Operating Hours
Setting/Changing Descriptive Hours
Maintaining Accurate Working Hours
WATCH: How to Block Off Days & Hours
The Importance of Accurate Working Hours
Showing up for tacos only to find the door closed is no fun. Not for your customers, and certainly not for you as a restaurant owner. Negative customer experiences will damage your restaurant’s reputation–both bad reviews and negative word of mouth. Avoid resulting revenue loss from future customers avoiding you based on avoidable experiences.
This article helps you learn how to keep the hours on your website up-to-date to prevent you from encountering such situations.
Operating vs. Descriptive Hours
From the sidebar of your SpotHopper platform, go to the "Hours" tab under "Your Info." 
You will see two different types of hours - operating and descriptive.
Operating hours are the actual working hours of your restaurant. For all SpotHopper inquiry forms on your website–such as reservations, orders, catering, and private parties–their timing info comes from your operating hours.
That is, if your operating hours are set to 10:00 am to 10:00 pm, this is the range of options that customers can choose from - as seen in the picture of the inquiry form here.- Descriptive Hours are optional. They do not affect your inquiry forms, but they do overwrite operating hours on your website. Their only purpose is to display hours on your website exactly as you type them within the platform.
If you have both operating and descriptive hours saved, only your descriptive hours will show at the bottom of your website homepage as seen below.
The option to set descriptive hours becomes available only after your website has been published.
Setting/Changing the Operating Hours
Within your SpotHopper platform, navigate to "Hours" under "Your Info."
Click on the plus sign to expand the "Operating Hours," as shown in the image below.
Next, add your hours of operation and click on "Save Operating Hours."
Unless you set descriptive hours, these will be the hours that will show on your website.
Setting/Changing the Descriptive Hours
If you have a strict working schedule and don’t allow reservations or other inquiries outside of these hours, simply setting up the operational hours will do the trick.
But what if you have divided/split hours? Currently, there is no option for you to save separate lunch and dinner "Operating Hours." To have them show on your website, you have to save your working hours as descriptive.
Navigate to "Hours" under "Your Info," and simply enter the working hours you wish to show on your website in the "Descriptive Hours" box. When done, click on "Save Descriptive Hours."
Regardless of your Operating Hours, the Descriptive Hours will now be shown on your homepage.
Remember, your descriptive hours are only used for your website! If you have a divided working time, you can keep the hours for your Inquiry forms accurate by adding operating hours starting with your first opening and ending with your last closing hour. You will then add block-off hours to prevent inquiries during the close time.
The descriptive hours are a great way to be transparent about your working schedule with your customers and show them their time is appreciated. You can use descriptive hours to announce holiday hours or other changes in your usual schedule due to renovations, special events, etc.
If you're available for catering pick-up after working hours or offer venue buy-out on days you're not open, then your working hours should be saved as "descriptive" so you can adjust the operating and block-off hours for your inquiries accordingly.
Maintaining Accurate Working Hours
In this digital age, your customers mostly rely on the information they find on online platforms and listings.
But since we know that regularly monitoring your working hours across different channels can be overwhelming, we have Google Integration to offer consistency and ensure that your accurate website hours will stay up-to-date on your Google profile, too.
How to Block Off Days & Hours