School holidays as a sales calendar: France, Germany, the Netherlands
Official 2026-27 school holiday dates for France, Germany and the Netherlands, and how travel agents can use them to time outreach and offers.
Three countries, three different ways of staggering school breaks. The official dates for 2026-27, and how to turn them into outreach before families start asking.
By Traviology · Published 2026-10-16
Families don't pick dates. Schools do. If you sell to families in France, Germany or the Netherlands, the education authorities have already published most of next year's busy weeks, and each country has solved the problem of crowding in its own way, which is useful, because it means the pressure arrives in waves instead of all at once.
France: three zones, staggered by weeks
Service-Public, France's official information site, lists the 2026-27 calendar for metropolitan France. The country is split into zones A, B and C, and the winter and spring breaks are staggered between them.
Winter 2027 starts with zone C, from Saturday 6 February to Monday 22 February. Zone A follows, 13 February to 1 March. Zone B comes last, 20 February to 8 March, so the whole stagger runs for a month. In spring it's the same order: zone C from 3 to 19 April, zone A from 10 to 26 April, zone B from 17 April to 3 May.
Zone C covers the academies of Paris, Créteil, Versailles, Montpellier and Toulouse. Zone B includes Lille, Aix-Marseille, Nantes, Nice and Strasbourg. Zone A includes Lyon, Bordeaux and Grenoble.
Two dates for the near term: Christmas runs from 19 December to 4 January, and summer begins on 3 July 2027. The pupils also have no class on Friday 7 May 2027.
Germany: sixteen states, an eleven-week window
The Kultusministerkonferenz's long-term summer plan covers every state. For 2027, the earliest start is 28 June in Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. The latest end is 13 September in Bavaria.
For flavour, Berlin and Brandenburg break up on 1 July and go back on 14 August, North Rhine-Westphalia runs 19 July to 31 August, and Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, the last two, run 29 July to 11 September and 2 August to 13 September.
The KMK adds a footnote that matters if you're counting days. States whose six-week period ends midweek may extend the break to the following weekend.
The Netherlands: three regions, three Saturdays
The government has fixed summer 2027 and says schools may not deviate. Region North goes from 10 July to 22 August. Region Middle: 17 July to 29 August. Region South: 24 July to 5 September.
What we'd do with it
Start with who asks when. Zone C leaves first and zone B last, so the same sunny destination can be asked about in three consecutive weeks, and each group needs the dates that apply to them. A Dutch family in Region South leaves two weeks after Region North and comes back two weeks later.
Then work backwards. If a client wants a school-break trip in early February, the conversation needs to start in the autumn. That's our habit, not a rule.
Pull together a one-page calendar of the three countries for your own desk. It takes an afternoon. It also shows you when the same destination will be asked for by three nationalities at once. That's when we'd expect availability to tighten, though we haven't checked it.
Limits
These are dates for the state school systems. Private and international schools may differ, and we haven't covered England, where term dates are set locally, or Spain or Italy. The KMK table we read is a 2021 decision republished in 2022, so look at the KMK's current calendar page before you promise anything for 2027. We haven't verified how any destination's prices respond to these dates.
Sources
Checked October 2026.
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