The Holiday Hack Every EU Tech Leader Should Know

Most organisations see public holidays as a resourcing challenge.
Smart organisations see them as a strategic advantage.
Across Europe, holiday calendars don’t overlap, and that means you can design a support model where one region is always working while another is off.
Here’s a simplified EU Support Rotation Table I’ve built (UK • Cyprus • France • Germany • Poland • Bulgaria) showing who can cover whom across the year (see the picture).

It works because:
  • Western Easter ≠ Orthodox Easter
  • UK bank holidays ≠ EU mainland holidays
  • PL and BG have unique national days
  • Cyprus doesn’t align with Western Europe
  • Only Christmas/New Year fully overlap

By aligning support rotations with Europe’s non-overlapping holiday cycles, you get:
  • Continuous coverage
  • Stronger SLAs with zero extra headcount
  • Happier, more resilient engineering teams
  • No one working on their own national holidays

If you’re running a distributed IT or SRE function in Europe, this is one of the simplest, most effective operational wins.

Inspired by a conversation with my favourite customer.