From the editorial :

"A team I work with now has converted four holidays to floating personal days – essentially vacation – and removing four minor holidays from the holiday schedule"

This is interesting, and I can see benefits both ways. Rolled up into normal annual leave it allows the days to be taken as a block, which gives more of a break and would allow you get away somewhere (e.g. a city break).

However, those holidays that are fixed in the calendar have a good social role to play as it makes it much easier to arrange to get people together when the majority of people are given the same day off.