Annual leave in a hotel: who sets the dates, the leave plan and the record

The employer decides when annual leave is taken, but not alone: it consults the leave board where one is required, or the worker representative in smaller workplaces, then sets the leave period or periods and announces them at the workplace. Workers request dates in writing a month ahead; the schedule must weigh those requests against the work situation. Leave cannot be split without agreement.

It is the second week of August, the house is full, and three people from the same department have asked for the same fortnight. The question in the general manager's inbox is not whether leave exists. It is who decides when it is taken. This article turns the annual leave rules Türkiye hotels work under, in Labour Law No. 4857 (opens in a new tab) and the Annual Paid Leave Regulation (opens in a new tab), into a yearly routine: who qualifies, who sets the dates, how leave is split, and what the record must show.

Who is entitled to annual leave in a hotel, and for how long?#

Anyone who has worked at least one year from their start date, probation included, is entitled to annual paid leave, and the length depends on service and age. The clock starts on the first day of work, not on the day a fixed-term contract is renewed or a trial period ends. This is why the contract type matters more than the job title: the Law's annual paid leave provisions do not apply to people in seasonal or campaign work that by its nature lasts less than a year.

Leave is counted in days, not shifts. A five-day week and a six-day week both produce 14 days for the same service tier, and the schedule must show the start and end dates. Check the entitlement date on the personnel file before the season starts, because a worker who crosses the one-year line mid-season becomes entitled during it.

Source: Law No. 4857, Article 53 (mevzuat.gov.tr, 2026).

The age floor overrides the tier. A 17-year-old in the first year of service gets at least 20 days, not 14, and so does a 50-year-old dishwasher with two years' service. Seasonal contracts raise their own questions, covered in hiring seasonal staff: contracts, social security entry and the end of the season.

Who decides when annual leave is taken?#

The employer does, after consulting the leave board or those acting for it, and it must announce the result at the workplace. Article 5 of the Annual Paid Leave Regulation lets the employer decide, according to the nature of the work, that leave is given in a set period or periods of each year. That decision is then announced at the workplace.

The worker asks in writing at least one month before the wanted date (Articles 7 and 8), which is a notice rule, not a booking rule. The board or employer is not bound by the dates the worker asks for, but the schedule is prepared taking the request and the work situation into account. Both halves of that sentence carry weight.

Where requests clash, priority goes to seniority at the workplace and then to the date of the previous year's leave. That is a rule a department head can apply on the spot, and it should be written into the clash decision. Announcement is the step hotels skip: a decision kept in a manager's head is not a leave plan, and it cannot be shown to a worker or an inspector. Keep the written requests, the announced plan and the clash decisions together, because the plan is only defensible if the reasoning behind each date is visible.

Can an employer send staff on leave in peak season?#

The Regulation gives the employer the timing decision, and it also builds in a window for collective leave: between the start of April and the end of October. Collective leave (Articles 10 and 11) may be applied to all or some workers inside that window, and it may also cover workers who are not yet entitled to leave.

Enough workers may be kept out of collective leave for the protection, maintenance, cleaning or security of the workplace; those workers take their leave before or after it, on dates they choose. The text does not declare August off-limits, and it does not require a worker's consent for the period the employer sets. What it requires is the board, the announcement and the schedule.

What the employer cannot do is solve a coverage problem by cutting leave into short pieces: splitting needs agreement, and one part must be at least ten days. For a year-round city hotel the constraint is coverage, not closure, so the plan should place leave in the shoulder weeks and protect the peak with the minimum number of people, not with refusals. Public holidays and weekly rest days are a separate account from annual leave, and mixing them in one record is how disputes start; see working on public holidays in a hotel: pay, consent and time records.

Splitting leave, and the four days of travel leave#

The employer may not split annual leave; by agreement of the parties it may be used in parts, one part being at least ten days. Article 6 of the Regulation puts the prohibition on the employer and the permission in the agreement, so a split needs a record of both sides agreeing, not a rota decision.

The ten-day floor means the remaining days can be arranged around the hotel's calendar, but the long block stays intact. A worker who spends leave away from the workplace's location gets up to four days of unpaid travel leave in total, on request and with proof; it is travel time, not extra annual leave. Record travel leave in its own column, because it is unpaid and must not be counted against the paid entitlement.

The common error is a plan that quietly turns 14 days into seven two-day blocks across the season. That is a split without agreement, whatever the rota says.

What happens in a hotel that closes for the winter?#

The answer depends on the nature of the work and the type of contract, not on the calendar. The Law's leave provisions exclude seasonal work that by its nature lasts less than a year, while the Regulation applies to workers employed permanently at a seasonal workplace (Article 12).

A worker hired for the season only, whose work ends with the season, falls outside the Article 53 leave provisions. A worker employed year-round at a seasonal hotel falls inside the Regulation's scope. Contract type decides which side of that line a person is on, so the file must show why a fixed-term contract was used.

A fixed-term contract may not be made several times in a row without an essential reason; otherwise it is deemed indefinite from the start (Article 11), which changes the leave picture for a worker re-hired every April. The collective dismissal rules do not apply when seasonal or campaign workers are dismissed because of the nature of that work (Article 29), which is a separate question from leave. For a hotel that closes, the closed months are the natural place for the long block, and the plan should say so in writing before the season ends. Where the season ends with days still unused, take the file to an accountant or legal adviser before settling; the calculation depends on facts this article cannot see. Season-end reporting has its own mechanics, covered in SGK exit codes at season end: which code a hotel reports.

What must the leave board, the leave plan and the leave record contain?#

A board or its small-workplace equivalent, a schedule with defined columns, and a signed record form for every worker. Workplaces with more than one hundred workers set up a three-person leave board: one representing the employer as chair and two representing workers, elected every two years. It prepares the schedules for the employer's approval and records decisions in a decision book. In workplaces with fewer than one hundred workers, the employer, its representative or a person they appoint does the board's work together with a representative the workers elect.

The schedule (Article 19) shows the worker's name, registration number, start date, date of entitlement, length of service, leave days, travel-leave days, and leave start and end dates. The record (Article 20) is the form annexed to the Regulation, which has a column for the worker's signature; a leave book or card index may also be used. Leave pay is paid in advance or as an advance before the leave starts (Article 21), so payroll and the plan have to be sequenced, not run in parallel.

The test of the file is simple: for any worker, on any date, can you show the entitlement, the announced plan, the signed record and the payment date?

A twelve-month leave calendar for one department#

Build the plan around the hotel's own occupancy curve, not around the calendar year, and publish it before the season starts. The example below is illustrative: a 40-person front-office and housekeeping department in a hotel with a strong May to October and a quiet January and February.

Requests arrive in writing a month before the wanted date, so the plan needs a cut-off that sits ahead of each peak, not behind it. Collective leave fits the quiet weeks and must end by 31 October; the peak months carry the ten-day minimum blocks and travel leave only. Reconcile the signed record forms against the announced plan in November, while the season's paperwork is still in one place. The same calendar works for a year-round city hotel with the months shifted, which is why the plan is a routine and not a template. Staffing the peaks is covered in hotel shift planning: covering the desk, floors and nights fairly.

Hypothetical example, not a legal template.

What to do next#

The next step is a file check, not a policy rewrite. Confirm whether your workplace needs a leave board or the small-workplace equivalent, then pull one worker's entitlement date, announced plan, signed record and payment date and see whether the four agree. If they do, the August requests become a scheduling problem with a written answer. If they do not, the plan is the thing to fix before the season, not the requests.