Public holidays close the things you came for

A trip planned around opening hours can still find everything shut. Holiday calendars are national, sometimes regional, and several of them move from year to year.

The calendar is not the same everywhere

Public holidays are set by national law and often supplemented by regional ones, so two cities in the same country can observe different days.

Religious calendars produce dates that move relative to the civil year, and some are confirmed only shortly before they occur, which makes advance planning genuinely difficult.

Bridging days, where a holiday falls near a weekend and the intervening day is taken informally, extend closures beyond the official date without appearing on any calendar.

What closes is not uniform

Government offices and banks close almost everywhere. Museums, shops and restaurants vary widely, and in some countries a holiday is the busiest trading day of the year.

Transport usually runs to a reduced timetable, frequently a Sunday service, which affects the first and last departures more than the middle of the day.

The specific combination matters: a day when transport is reduced and attractions are open behaves very differently from one where both are closed.

Peak domestic travel follows the same dates

Holidays generate large internal travel flows, so trains and roads are at their busiest and accommodation prices rise in the destinations residents visit.

This is why a national holiday can make a quiet region crowded and a major city empty, reversing the usual pattern a visitor expects.

Long holiday periods amplify it further, since a week-long observance shifts an entire population's travel into the same two or three days at each end.

Weekly closures are a separate rule

Many museums close one weekday, commonly at the start of the week, for maintenance and staffing reasons entirely unrelated to holidays.

Combining a weekly closure with a public holiday can close a site for several consecutive days, which is the case that catches short trips.

Seasonal hours are a third layer, with reduced opening outside the main tourist months that is published on the venue's site rather than in aggregated listings.

Checking, and what to check against

The authoritative source is the venue's own calendar rather than a general list, since major institutions frequently open on holidays and close the following day instead.

For anything requiring an office, a visa collection, a bank, a permit, the relevant calendar is the local working one, and a single holiday can add several days to the process.