Guide
What hours should your business actually open?
Most opening hours are folklore — inherited from a previous shop, a landlord, or “what people expect.” But your right hours are an empirical question, and once your bookings live in one system, the answer is sitting in your own data.
Read your demand curve
After a month of scheduling in one place, look at when bookings actually land: which hours fill first, which days book out, where the permanent dead zones are. Your earnings-by-day view adds the money dimension — busy hours and profitable hours aren’t always the same ones.
Hunt the invisible demand
Paper books only show demand you could serve. A booking link shows demand you couldn’t: clients hunting slots before you open, after you close, on your day off. If the first Tuesday slot books out instantly every week, there’s a queue forming before your door opens — that’s an earlier open asking to exist.
Test extensions cheaply
Don’t commit — experiment. Open one extra evening for a month (in Reservy: push your closing hour later, and the new slots go bookable instantly). If the slots fill, the demand was real; if they sit empty for four weeks, close them again. You risked one month of one evening, not a policy.
Cut the hours that never pay
The reverse experiment matters more: the standing dead hours — the empty first hour, the ghost-town mid-afternoon — are hours you’re paying for in presence and energy. Shift them: open later, close that gap with a standing admin block, or compress to four denser days. Fewer, fuller hours beat long, hollow ones for both revenue and sanity.
Frequently asked questions
Should I match my competitors’ hours?
Their hours encode their demand, not yours. The useful competitive question is the gap: if every shop in the area closes at 6, a 6–8 p.m. evening might be an underserved goldmine — one you can test for a month before committing.
How often should I revisit hours?
Twice a year, or whenever the data shows a sustained shift — a season change, a neighborhood change, a clientele change. Hours aren’t an identity; they’re a setting, and settings you can measure are settings you can tune.