What are Spotlight and Raid Hours in Pokemon Go?

Spotlight Hours and Raid Hours appears once per week, but what are they exactly?

Spotlight Hour

On Tuesdays 6pm to 7pm in your local time, a specific Pokemon will heavily spawn instead of the many different other mons, although on some occations a spotlight hour features more than one mon. During this hour, there is an extra benefit, such as double catch EXP, double catch candy, double transfer candy, double Stardust, and double evolution EXP.

How to benefit from it?

This is your opportunity to get lots of candy for a specific mon. This especially helps newer players who probably won't have enough candy to fully power a mon. On top of that, the bonus during the hour is greatly beneficial.

With double catch EXP, try to land excellent throws to get lots of EXP. This is especially with larger mons that you can reliably throw Excellent Curveballs on.

With double catch candy, you can get lots of candy to max out the Pokemon.

With double transfer candy, you can transfer unneeded mons that you've been hoarding for extra candy. A tip is to tag them before the hour starts.

With double Stardust, you can get lots of Stardust to be used to power up your mons, as you can't power them with just candy. You need Stardust too! This is especially useful for spotlight hours with mons that grants extra Stardust when caught. For example, Paras gives 500 Stardust instead of 100.

With double evolution EXP, you can hoard a bunch of cheap-to-evolve mons, tag them, and then mass evolve them (preferably with Lucky Eggs) to get lots of EXP!

On top of this, you can use this opportunity to shiny hunt the spotlight mon!

Raid Hours

On Wednesdays 6pm to 7pm in your local time, the Raid Boss currently in rotation will appear in gyms.

How to benefit from it?

This is your opportunity to get powerful Legendaries. Being set at a specific time, many players will be raiding the bosses. Join the raid to potentially get a strong Pokemon, many items, and EXP. During the raid, the mons in the gyms can't be attacked, so it you put your mons in them, they are guaranteed to stay for the hour.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned about Spotlight and Raid Hours.