I can recall a time when I told off for NOT taking holidays and that the company had introduced a policy to ideally take some time off before April, before August and before December.

Most people banked them for Christmastime, but then there was too many people off during the holidays (It was a service provider so it was open 362 days (25/12, 26/12, 1/1 were the only days the business shut except for on-call))

And of course, the longer your tenure, the more days off that you had. Anything that we didn’t use in the year would need to be taken within January of the next or you simply lose them.