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I've offered to help the local village move their tennis court bookings from paper-based to web-based. I've sold tickets for quite a few one-off events via TicketTailor (quite nice when you've got your head round it, and affordable for paid events), so figured how hard could this be? Now I've stopped and thought about it, I realise that managing hourly bookings for a tennis court 7 days a week, every week, 52 weeks a year is a completely different deal from running a single event every month. Does anyone have any experience of software that's good for booking a court, pitch etc, and cheap to run?
Thanks for any advice,
Can you access LTA club spark?
Cycling club uses something called Acuity Scheduling. I've no idea what it costs though.
How online and connected are they? Can they use a Google calendar for it and tie a Google form and PayPal payment request to it?
Any facility in something like Google calendar?
as above, we use LTA Spark
Whats their budget?
How tech savvy are they? This is surprisingly important, I've found. I do stuff like this with microsoft products at work, and people are often very gung ho when they first ask for a solution, but a lot less so when they find out that its not magic and they'll need to use it.
If its only 1 court and is likely to only ever be 1 court, you could set up a Google Calendar for it. Depends what bells and whistles they think they might need.
Set up an MS Office/Sharepoint in the name of 'tennis club bookings'.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app
Are you wanting to take payments? Deal with cancellations? Refunds? Does it need restricted to members, or different prices for different people? Or at different times of day? Do opening times remain the same every week? Is there any need for say a club/coach to block book the next 12 wednesdays 6-8pm? This is where the fun in these systems comes...
Are you wanting to take payments? Deal with cancellations? Refunds? Does it need restricted to members, or different prices for different people? Or at different times of day? Do opening times remain the same every week? Is there any need for say a club/coach to block book the next 12 wednesdays 6-8pm? This is where the fun in these systems comes...
LTA Club Spark user here, too
I used to use https://simplybook.me/en/ when I ran a Bike Fit booking service. You get 50 bookings pm for free, you can pay to accept payments online etc.
My swimming teacher uses https://bookwhen.com/pricing - looks similar to simplybook.me
Thanks for all the replies - all very useful starting points.
The current paper solution costs nothing except time, and membership/court cost is super cheap, so £15-20/month for SimplyBook or Acuity will feel like a big step, but you can't save significant time (which is the aim) without spending some money...
I have some more info now (below), I just don't know yet whether they are/can be/want to be LTA members.
If its only 1 court and is likely to only ever be 1 court, you could set up a Google Calendar for it -- it is, and will remain, only one court.
Depends what bells and whistles they think they might need -- a few bells and whistles, as below (thanks poly for the great question list)
Are you wanting to take payments? -- yes
Deal with cancellations? -- yes, self service
Refunds? -- yes (though I suspect this could maybe be dropped in favour of rescheduling)
Does it need restricted to members, or different prices for different people? Or at different times of day? -- members play free, guests pay (same price whenever they play), so I need to be able to tell who's who when they book a court, and it would be great if membership could managed in the same place
Do opening times remain the same every week? -- yes
Is there any need for say a club/coach to block book the next 12 wednesdays 6-8pm? -- no
Info on ClubSpark seems quite hard to find without registering your venue - would ClubSpark do all/most of the above if they can join LTA?
Thanks!
Our sports club uses lta for tennis and SportyHQ for squash - not sure if that’s a generic platform or not.
My wife is chair of a bigger tennis club (13 courts!) And everything you are describing is in Club Spark. Yes, people do have to register with the LTA, but it is free. Suggest you drop the LTA an email and they will be happy to help