Best-practice recommendations for handling holiday pauses in an always-on nurture journey built with trigger smart campaigns.

Yes, but you need to integrate a holiday feed yourself — Marketo has no knowledge of international holiday schedules, let alone which ones you want to honor with a pause!

For the feed, timeanddate.com’s Holidays API is well-maintained (despite the kind of generic name, it’s an established service!).  There are some other ways like using an otherwise empty Google Calendar. Then you use the holiday feed in conjunction with the Marketo REST API to de/activate the trigger campaigns.

(There’s no way to do this entirely within the Marketo Engage platform — any work w/assets like this requires some kind of external app/task runner, even if it’s relatively simple.)

You don't need the feed if you hardcode the dates every year. But that's not the hard part anyway. You still need to call the API.

People in Waits don't exit the campaign when it's deactivated. That would be a separate option.