Human Resource Blog

Vacation Days Restrictions

I work for a major privately-owned timeshare company in Orlando, Florida in a call center, in a inbound call department. It is in the hospitality industry and therefore has “peak season” and “slow seasons” in relation to how busy it gets in terms of incoming phone calls we get at the different times of the year.

After one year of service, we get 10 vacation days in addition to 5 sick/personal days, but they mix them to give us a total of 15 PTO days per year, and they expire on our anniversary date, they do not roll over.

However, they have a calendar of “peak season” days which are the busyist time of the year, during which we are prohibited from requesting to use our vacation days the company gives us. I added it up, and it comes out to 271 days out of 365.

So we are restricted from taking time off for 75% of the year. The two longest stretches include a two month block of February 15 - April 15 and a 3 1/2 month block from May 15 - September 2nd. Plus the last three weeks of the year. Basically any time when the children are out of school, we cannot go on vacation.

Can they block us from taking vacation for such an extended time, and restrict our days off to 25% of the calendar?? How are we supposed to take a family vacations if I can never travel when my kids are out of school? This was not a policy when I started with the company in 2003, but was instituted in 2006.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Is this policy legal? Yes, it is. There is no federal or state law that requires employers to offer paid vacations, or regulates their use. Is this policy good management that creates a healthy work/life balance for employees and increases employee morale? No, it is not. In this situation, many employers would simply hire one additional full or part-time employee, so that they could have at least one employee on vacation each week. By setting such a policy, the company sends a clear message to employees that they do not expect employees to have a quality family life. They may also be banking on the fact that many employees will be unable to use their vacation time, and will lose it. Such a policy is almost guaranteed to result in high turnover among dedicated, hardworking employees.