The reason for this was to keep people from "going on vacation" for only a few minutes or a few hours at a time due to timeout protection triggering often when playing an absurdly large number of games. Now, whenever you go on vacation, you're going to lose at least a full day's worth of your time. And if you auto-vacation multiple times in a day (possible if you do not make moves in all of your games once you return from "vacation"), you're going to needlessly waste a lot of your vacation time and may soon run out.
If you go on vacation for more than a day, however, there is no need to penalize you and you only get charged for the amount of vacation time you use, whether that is 25 hours or several weeks. Only the first 24 hours (per vacation) gets deducted in the manner indicated. Anything above that is normal.
Makes a lot of sense. I incorrectly thought you were deducted a full 24 hours for each day.
"The text in red shows how much vacation time you have remaining. Please note that each time you go on vacation a minimum of 24 hours of your remaining vacation budget is consumed."
The above mentioned statement is straight forward and easy to interpret. However, once you read the following:
"Example 3: If you are on vacation for 25 hours, then it is 25 hours (not 48) that will be consumed."
From reading the forum I was under the impression vacation time is deducted in 24 hour periods. Although I realize it does not specifically say that in the post. Based on the above example, it would seem odd if you deducted 1 hour from 24, to have 23 hours remaining of vacation time, does it not?
https://support.chess.com/customer/portal/articles/1444787-how-does-vacation-work-how-much-time-do-i-get-