Vacation calendar: school holidays and public holidays at a glance 2026/05/02
Anyone planning sessions lives with the school holiday calendar — and with the fact that every German federal state has its own dates. Until now that meant a holiday table in one browser tab, the backoffice in another, and your eyes and brain as the comparison tool. With the new vacation calendar, this overview now lives directly inside Bookacamp and shows four calendar years — the current one plus three years ahead — on a single page.
What you see
The view follows the heatmap pattern: one square per day, seven rows for the days of the week, columns marching week by week through the year. The colour of each cell tells you at a glance what is going on that day.
- Blue tones mark public holidays. The darker the shade, the more federal states are off at the same time.
- Green tones stand for school holidays — again with shades that show how many of the selected federal states are affected.
- Purple appears whenever school holidays and a public holiday fall on the same day — typical for Good Friday, Ascension Day or Whit Monday during a holiday week.
Each year block carries the month abbreviations Jan through Dec on top, so even in the dense grid your eye finds its position right away. Hovering a cell brings up a tooltip with the date, the number of affected federal states and the names of the relevant public holidays or school vacations.
Filters — fitting any planning situation
By default all 16 federal states and both layers — public holidays and school holidays — are active. A click on a federal-state chip toggles it on or off, and the buttons All federal states and No federal states handle bulk operations. To focus on school holidays only, simply switch off the Public holidays layer, and vice versa. The heatmap reacts immediately, with no reload.
Where the calendar lives — and where the data comes from
The page sits in the backoffice under Info-I (Top-Menü) → Vacation calendar and is rendered directly above the familiar calendar event table. That way your own entries and the federal-state context appear together in a single view. The data comes from the open OpenHolidays API; a single import run populates the database and new accounts receive the dataset automatically when they sign up.
Why this matters
The seasonal calendar is the foundation of any serious session planning — early arrival days, bridge days, tight Whitsun weeks and the notorious holiday gaps between federal states all influence occupancy. With the vacation calendar your whole team has the same visualisation in the same system; that saves research time, avoids spreadsheet copy-paste and makes it easier to schedule sessions deliberately against — or deliberately into — a school holiday week.
The feature is available for all accounts immediately and requires no configuration.
Author: Mathias Methner