The short answer
Holiday phone coverage comes down to three decisions made before Thanksgiving: which days you are open, closed or emergency-only; what a caller hears and can book on each kind of day; and who, if anyone, is on call.
Everything else in this plan is detail around those three. The reason to settle them early is that the holiday stretch is when the gap between how the phone behaves and how the office is staffed is widest. Calls do not stop because the office is empty. Heating fails on cold mornings, drains back up when a house is full of guests, and people locked out of a car do not check the calendar first.
As of October 2026, there are roughly six weeks before the stretch that runs from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day. That is enough time to plan it properly. This guide covers the calendar, the greeting, emergency rules, surcharge disclosure, booking into January, staff time off, reminders, minutes and a week-by-week checklist. Where it mentions software, it refers to Run with Jarvis, and capability claims are limited to its published plan list.
Why the holidays are different
The office and the phone come apart. For most of the year, when the business is open someone is there to answer. Over the holidays you may be technically open with half the staff, or closed with customers still calling.
Callers do not know your schedule. A customer has no way to know whether you work the Friday after Thanksgiving or the week between Christmas and New Year. If the phone rings out, they assume you are closed and call someone else, including on days you were open.
Emergencies carry more weight. A furnace failure with relatives staying, or a blocked drain on the morning of a holiday meal, is more urgent to the customer than the same fault in March. The business that answers and gives a clear answer, even if the answer is "tomorrow at 8", is remembered.
Routine work piles up behind the break. Callers who want non-urgent work will happily book for January if someone offers it. If nobody answers, they call again in January, or they do not.
Staff need the time. A plan that depends on the owner carrying the phone through every holiday dinner is a plan that will be abandoned by the second week.
How call volume shifts through the year in different trades, and how to prepare for it, is covered in the seasonal call volume guide.
Step 1: Label every day
Take a calendar from the Monday before Thanksgiving to the first Monday in January. Give every day one of three labels.
Open. Normal hours, normal crew, normal prices.
Emergency-only. The office is closed and no routine work is done, but a technician is on call for jobs that meet your written emergency definition. Holiday pricing applies.
Closed. No dispatch at all. Calls are still answered and work is booked for the next open day. If you never close completely, you do not need this label, but most small businesses want at least two or three true days off.
Decide the in-between days deliberately. The day before Thanksgiving, the Friday after it, Christmas Eve, the days between Christmas and New Year, and New Year's Eve are the ones where businesses drift into being half open. Half open is the worst state for a caller, because the phone behaves unpredictably. Pick a label, and if it is reduced hours, write the hours down.
Here is an example calendar. The dates and choices are illustrative, and yours will differ by trade and by region.
| Date range | Status | Who answers | What gets booked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday to Wednesday before Thanksgiving | Open, reduced hours Wednesday | Office staff, AI receptionist for overflow and after hours | Same-day and scheduled jobs as normal |
| Thanksgiving Day | Emergency-only | AI receptionist, on-call technician alerted for emergencies | Emergencies dispatched at holiday pricing, routine work booked from Friday or Monday |
| Friday after Thanksgiving | Open, small crew | AI receptionist first, one office person for escalations | Limited same-day slots, the rest booked into the following week |
| Early to mid December | Open | Office staff, AI receptionist for overflow and after hours | Normal booking, plus January slots for non-urgent work |
| Christmas Eve | Open until midday, then emergency-only | Office staff in the morning, AI receptionist after | Morning jobs only, emergencies after midday |
| Christmas Day | Closed or emergency-only | AI receptionist, on-call technician if emergency-only | Emergencies only if on call, everything else booked for the next open day |
| Days between Christmas and New Year | Open, small crew | AI receptionist first, on-call technician | Urgent work same day, routine work into January |
| New Year's Eve and New Year's Day | Emergency-only | AI receptionist, on-call technician | Emergencies at holiday pricing, routine work from the first open day |
| First week of January | Open | Full office and crew | Backlog booked during the break, plus new calls |
Once the labels are set, everything else follows from them: the greeting, the prices, the rota and the calendar blocks.
Step 2: Write the emergency definition
"Emergency-only" means nothing until you say what an emergency is. Write it for your trade in a short list.
What qualifies. For a plumber: active leaks that cannot be shut off, sewage backing up, no water to the building. For HVAC: no heat when it is cold outside, especially with elderly people or infants in the home. For an electrician: loss of power to the building that is not a utility outage, anything hot, sparking or smelling of burning. For a locksmith: a person locked out, or a child or pet locked in.
What does not. A dripping faucet, a noisy fan, a second bathroom drain running slowly, a spare key. These are booked for the next open day.
What the first instruction is. For anything with a safety risk, the caller should be told what to do before anyone is dispatched: shut the water at the main, leave the building and call the gas utility, call emergency services. Decide the approved wording in advance. General safety guidance for your own crews working in winter conditions is published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Who gets alerted. One named on-call technician per day, with a named backup. Not a group text.
What the customer is told. The price including the holiday surcharge, an honest arrival estimate, and the alternative of the first standard-rate appointment.
The reasoning behind emergency rules and how they work on ordinary nights is covered in the after-hours calls playbook. The holiday version is the same structure with a wider window.
Step 3: Set the greeting for each kind of day
What callers hear in the first ten seconds should match the day's label.
Open days. No change. If hours are reduced, say so: "We are open until noon today."
Emergency-only days. "We are closed for the holiday and handling emergencies only today. I can help with an emergency now, or book you for our next opening on Friday." Then the normal intake begins.
Closed days. "We are closed today and reopen on Monday. I can get you booked now so you are first on the schedule."
Rules for all three. Keep it short. State the status first, because that is what the caller needs. Do not open with a long seasonal message. Say the next open day as a real date. And make sure the greeting leads into a conversation, not a mailbox. A holiday greeting followed by a beep puts you back to voicemail on the days it costs the most.
Update the other places. Your Google Business Profile holiday hours, your website and any chat or text auto-replies should say the same thing as the phone. A profile that says "open" on a closed day produces the angriest calls of the year.
Set the dates in advance. Whatever system answers your phone should switch on a schedule, so nobody has to remember to change it on Wednesday evening and change it back on Friday morning.
Step 4: Put the holiday surcharge in the first quote
If you charge more on holidays, the customer must hear it before they agree to the visit.
Decide the amount and the window. A flat holiday surcharge is easier to quote and to accept than a multiplier. Write down exactly which dates and hours it applies to.
State one total. "On the holiday the visit is this much in total, including our holiday surcharge." A caller who hears a base price, agrees, and then hears an extra charge will feel misled even if every number is fair.
Offer the alternative in the same sentence. "Or I can book you for Friday morning at our standard rate." Some callers will wait, and that is a good outcome: a booked job at normal cost to you.
Put it in writing. The confirmation text should repeat the quoted total.
Apply it consistently. The surcharge should not depend on who answers or how the caller sounds.
How to set the amount, and the common ways surcharges go wrong, are covered in after-hours and emergency surcharge pricing. Requirements for price disclosure and written estimates vary by state and sometimes by trade, so check with an attorney. General guidance on pricing claims is available from the Federal Trade Commission.
Step 5: Open January on the calendar now
The easiest revenue of the season is routine work booked during the break for the weeks after it.
Load January availability early. If the calendar only shows two weeks ahead, nobody can book past the holiday. Open the first three weeks of January before Thanksgiving.
Hold capacity for the backlog. The first open days after a closure fill quickly with urgent work that waited. Block part of those days for it so routine bookings made in December do not crowd out a no-heat call on January 2.
Offer specific slots. "I can book you for Tuesday the 5th in the morning" closes more often than "sometime in the new year".
Take the details now. Run the full intake during the December call. The January visit should not start with a callback to ask what the problem was.
Consider a deposit for larger jobs. Work booked weeks ahead is more likely to be cancelled. For installations and long appointments, a deposit protects the slot.
State the reschedule terms at booking. Customers who book four weeks out will sometimes need to move. Tell them how. A clear policy and how to word it are in the cancellation and reschedule policy guide.
Step 6: Give staff time off without dead lines
The purpose of the plan is that people get their holidays and the phone still works.
Separate answering from being on call. Answering every call is one job. Going out to emergencies is another. An AI receptionist can do the first around the clock in English and Spanish, which is part of every Run with Jarvis plan. The on-call technician then hears only about calls that meet the emergency rule.
Build the rota early and share it. One name per emergency-only day, one backup. Publish it before Thanksgiving week so people can plan.
Pay for on-call fairly and say how. Whatever your arrangement is, staff should know it before they agree to a day. Wage and hour rules apply, and they vary by state, so check with an attorney or your payroll provider.
Cap the load. If the on-call technician has taken two emergencies on a holiday, decide in advance whether a third goes to the backup or is booked for the morning.
Give the office a real break. If the office is closed, nobody from the office should be answering routine calls from their kitchen. That is what the answering layer is for.
Write down who decides exceptions. A long-standing commercial customer with a problem on a closed day is a judgment call. Name the one person who makes it.
Step 7: Send reminders for bookings made weeks ahead
A job booked on December 10 for January 6 has almost a month in which to be forgotten.
Confirm at booking. A text with the date, the window and the quoted price.
Remind before the visit. A reminder a few days ahead and another the day before. The earlier one matters most for long-dated bookings, because it gives you time to refill the slot if the customer cancels.
Make rescheduling easy. A customer who cannot make it should be able to say so with one reply or one call, at any hour.
Send the on-the-way text. Automatic ETA and arrival SMS are part of Core, and they matter more than usual in the first week of January when schedules are tight.
Confirm the large jobs by voice. For installations and half-day appointments, a confirmation call a few days ahead is worth it. The platform's AI outbound follow-up calls can make confirmation calls to your own customers. See the pricing page for which plan includes that capability.
The timing and wording that work are covered in reducing no-shows with appointment reminders.
Step 8: Check your minutes against your plan
If an AI receptionist is answering more of your calls over the holidays than in a normal month, your talk time will be higher. Estimate it instead of finding out on the bill.
A hypothetical example. Suppose a heating company normally sends only after-hours and overflow calls to the AI receptionist, about 120 calls a month at 3 minutes each. That is 360 minutes, inside the 500 minutes included with Core at $500/month.
The holiday month. Suppose in December the office is closed or short-staffed for eight days and the AI answers everything on those days. Suppose that adds 160 calls at 3 minutes, or 480 minutes. The month totals 840 minutes.
The cost on each plan. On Core, 840 minutes is 500 included plus 340 overage minutes at $0.45/min, which is $153, for a total of $653. On Pro, 840 minutes fits inside the 1,000 included for $750. In this hypothetical month Core with overage is still cheaper on minutes alone.
Where the line is. Core with overage costs the same as Pro at roughly 1,055 minutes. Above that, Pro is cheaper on minutes, and it adds call tracking, transcription and lead scoring.
What to do with this. Run the same arithmetic with your own call counts from last December. Plans are month-to-month, so a business that expects one heavy month can look at the numbers for that month specifically. The fuller method for matching a plan to your volume is in how to choose an AI receptionist plan.
Every figure in the example other than the plan prices is invented for illustration.
A week-by-week checklist
Four weeks before Thanksgiving.
- Label every day from Thanksgiving week to the first Monday of January as open, emergency-only or closed.
- Write the emergency definition and the approved safety instructions.
- Decide the holiday surcharge, its dates and its hours.
Three weeks before.
- Build the on-call rota with a backup for each day, and share it.
- Open January availability on the calendar and block backlog capacity on reopening days.
- Write the three greetings.
Two weeks before.
- Load the holiday schedule so greetings and booking rules switch automatically.
- Update holiday hours on your Google Business Profile and website.
- Brief the office and the technicians on what callers will be told.
One week before.
- Test it. Call your own number as if it were a closed day and an emergency-only day. Check what you hear, what you can book and whether the on-call alert arrives.
- Confirm the on-call technician has the van stocked for the likely emergencies.
Thanksgiving week.
- Review the first holiday's calls the next open morning. Fix anything that confused callers.
Early December.
- Push January booking on every routine call.
- Check minutes used so far against your plan.
Christmas week through New Year.
- Run the schedule as planned. Review calls after each closed day.
- Keep the backup on notice.
First week of January.
- Work the backlog in the order it was booked, with emergencies first.
- Hold a short review: which days were mislabeled, which emergencies did not fit the definition, how many jobs were booked during closures. Write the answers down for next year.
Common mistakes
Leaving the normal greeting on a closed day. Callers assume you are open and wait for a call that is not coming.
A holiday message followed by voicemail. The most expensive days of the year to send a new customer to a mailbox.
No written emergency definition. The on-call technician gets woken for a dripping tap, or a real emergency gets booked for Monday.
Revealing the surcharge at the door. Fair price, unfair delivery, bad review.
A calendar that stops at December 31. Nobody can book January work.
Reopening with no backlog capacity. The first day back is full before the first emergency call.
Group alerts for emergencies. Everyone assumes someone else took it.
No review afterward. The same problems return next November.
Where to start
Print a calendar for the six weeks from Thanksgiving week to early January and write one of three words on every day. That single page settles most of the plan. Then write the emergency definition, set the surcharge, open January and test what a caller hears on a closed day.
For small business planning resources on staffing and seasonal cash flow, the Small Business Administration is a useful general reference.
Plans are on the pricing page: Core $500, Pro $750 and Elite $1,200 per month, with zero setup fees, unlimited users and month-to-month terms. To set up holiday coverage against your own calendar and call volume, get in touch.
