HubSpot Holiday Prep Checklist

Keep your portal running smoothly while your team is out of office

Remember: International organizations may still receive inquiries during U.S. holidays. Plan for continuity, not just coverage.

Before You Leave Prepare your portal for smooth sailing
Team Coordination
Confirm out-of-office dates for all team members
Identify backup owners for incoming signals and relationship follow-up
Communicate coverage plan to the team
Encourage team to add upcoming OOO dates to email signatures
Email & Marketing
Review upcoming email schedule and adjust send dates
Consider international audiences (not everyone celebrates the same holidays)
Add workflow pause dates to email workflowsSettings → Pause actions on specific dates
Set pauses to recur annually for fixed holidays
Add wait-until-time actions after pauses to prevent midnight sends
Signal Routing
Update routing workflows to direct signals to available team members
Adjust round robin settings in Help DeskIf using Service Hub
Set HubSpot out-of-office statusSettings → Working hours
Relationship Messaging
Update thank-you emails with holiday response time expectations
Add holiday messaging to high-traffic form thank-you pages
Update chatbot/chat flow messages to set expectations
Update automated ticket follow-up messagesIf using Service Hub
Consider a dedicated out-of-office workflow for demo/contact form submissions
During the Break What to leave running vs. what to pause

Keep Running

Resource downloads (PDFs, guides)

No need to pause immediate value delivery

Pause or Modify

Nurture sequences and relationship follow-ups that expect a human response

Pro Tip

If using the Global Workflow Partition Pattern (see below), ensure new contacts get set to "holiday" mode automatically.

When You Return First thing Monday morning
Re-enable paused workflows
Restore normal signal routing rules
Remove holiday messaging from forms, emails, and chat flows
Set all contacts back to "normal" modeIf using Global Workflow Partition Pattern
Review any form submissions or signals that came in during the holiday
Update team on anything that needs immediate follow-up
Advanced: Global Workflow Partition Pattern

Instead of pausing multiple workflows individually, create a single control property that acts as a switch for your entire portal. One property controls holiday behavior across all workflows — simpler to activate, harder to forget to reset.

Setup

1Create a contact property "Portal Mode" (dropdown: Normal, Holiday)
2Add an if/then branch at the start of each affected workflow checking this property
3Normal branch: Standard routing, emails, timing
Holiday branch: Backup routing, modified messaging

Activation

!Before: Select all contacts → Edit → Set "Portal Mode" to "Holiday"
~During: Create workflow to set new contacts to "Holiday" mode
✓After: Select all contacts → Edit → Set "Portal Mode" to "Normal"
Automate the Switch

Create scheduled workflows that run at specific dates/times to switch modes automatically — set it once in early November and forget about it.