Welcome to the Community @alice_deflo! +1 for the resources from @stassey here. I think HubSpot has come a long way in tools like working hours and out of office within Tickets/Service Hub. Here’s a practical plan I think might work for you.
In my experience, the cleanest approach is to treat this as two different requirements: (1) route new tickets to your named backup while you are away, and (2) give that backup visibility and response capability for existing tickets without changing their Ticket owner. As much as they’ve improved, I don’t think HubSpot offers a simple “vacation delegate” setting that preserves ownership while automatically redirecting every reply, so the recommended design is a temporary routing change plus a ticket-based notification workflow.
Here’s the plan I’ll lay out below for a one-week vacation:
- Create a temporary Vacation Coverage – [Your Name] ticket workflow.
- Add a clear start/end date condition.
- For qualifying new tickets, set Ticket owner directly to your backup—no Round Robin action.
- Set yourself to Away for the full absence.
- Create a second workflow: when Last customer reply date updates and Ticket owner is you, notify the backup with the ticket link.
- Verify the backup has Help Desk/channel access and can reply from the team email.
- Test with one internal test ticket and one customer-reply simulation before leaving.
- When you return, disable both temporary workflows and restore normal routing/availability.
First step: Route new tickets to your backup.
Don’t use the existing eight-person Round Robin workflow for tickets that should go only to your backup. Instead, for the vacation period, create a narrowly scoped, temporary ticket-based workflow that:
- Enrolls only tickets that would normally come to you—for example, by ticket source, pipeline, customer segment, team, or another rule that identifies your normal assignment path.
- Uses Edit record to set Ticket owner directly to the specific backup user.
- Is placed before, or otherwise prevents enrollment into, your normal Round Robin assignment logic.
- Is turned off when you return.
A direct Edit record → Ticket owner = [Backup colleague] action is preferable to Rotate record to owner because it has no rotation behavior at all: every eligible ticket goes to that one person. HubSpot supports direct ownership assignment through workflows, while the rotation action is designed for distribution among an assignment pool.
If your tickets originate in Help Desk channels, you can also temporarily update the channel’s routing rules to route to Specific users and teams and select only the backup. Help Desk supports routing to a specified user/team, a team only, a workflow, a contact owner, or no one; round robin is just one distribution option, not a requirement.
Important: mark yourself Away… this is where I think HubSpot’s evolving Service Hub functionality can help.
Set your Help Desk/Inbox availability to Away before leaving, or have an admin do it through Settings → Inbox & Help Desk → Availability Management. Users marked Away are not eligible for automatic assignment when routing respects availability. This protects you from new assignments that still pass through existing routing rules.
That said, availability alone will not guarantee that every ticket goes to your backup—it may leave tickets unassigned or route them to another eligible user depending on the existing configuration. Use the dedicated “assign directly to backup” workflow/routing rule for deterministic coverage.
Now for the next step: Handle replies on tickets you still own. For the tickets that remain owned by you, use a ticket-based workflow that alerts your backup whenever a customer replies.
Here’s a ticket-based workflow I’d recommend.
- Enrollment trigger: Last customer reply date is known
- Enable re-enrollment when Last customer reply date is updated.
- Add a date branch or an enrollment condition so it operates only during your vacation window.
- Add a condition: Ticket owner is [Your name]
- Action: Send an internal notification or internal email notification to [Backup colleague].
- Include ticket personalization tokens, such as Ticket name, Ticket ID, Ticket status, priority, contact name, and ticket record URL.
[Last customer reply date] is a HubSpot-populated ticket property that records the date of the most recent customer email response, which makes it the right standard property for detecting customer replies.
This workflow leaves Ticket owner unchanged, but gives your colleague an actionable alert whenever a customer responds.
Here’s what you can include in the workflow notification:
- Customer reply received on a ticket owned by [Your Name].
Ticket: [Ticket name]
Priority: [Priority]
Status: [Ticket status]
Open ticket: [record URL]
Then, use an in-app notification, internal email, or Slack notification if your portal and notification setup support it. For a short vacation, an internal email/in-app notification is usually the least complex and most reliable option.
Last step: Let the backup respond. Your backup can reply from the associated Help Desk conversation as long as they have a Service or Sales seat/access appropriate to your portal, permission to view and edit the relevant tickets, and access to the Help Desk or Inbox/channel where the conversation lives.
Hope that helps!
