Setting up an online court booking system for a badminton, tennis or padel club

Most scheduling software assumes you are booking a person's time. A club is booking a court — sometimes several at once, sometimes shared between four players, usually at different prices depending on the hour. That difference is why generic booking links tend not to fit.

Courts are capacity, not calendars

A consultant's calendar is binary: the hour is free or it is not. A court is not. Four players sharing a court is one booking that fills it. Two players might use half. A coaching session might block the court and a coach at once.

If your software can only express "busy" or "free", you will end up managing the difference in your head or in a parallel spreadsheet. Look for a system that models how much of a resource each booking consumes.

Peak and off-peak pricing is the norm, not an edge case

Weekday mornings and weekday evenings are different products at different prices. Any system you consider should let you set price by day and time without creating a separate service for each combination — otherwise your booking page turns into a list of thirty near-identical entries.

Members and visitors

Almost every club has at least two prices and often two sets of rules: members book further ahead, pay less, or get priority at certain times. Decide early whether you want to enforce that in software or handle it socially. Enforcing it is more work to set up and much less work to run.

Recurring bookings will be most of your calendar

The same four players, every Tuesday at seven, for the season. In many clubs these regular slots are the majority of court time, and they are exactly what paper handles well and cheap software handles badly.

Before committing, check: can you create a repeating booking, cancel one instance without destroying the series, and see clearly which slots are genuinely open after the regulars are placed?

Multiple locations, one club

Clubs that run courts at two sites need availability that spans both without making players pick a site first. A player usually wants "a court at seven", not "the hall on the north side at seven".

What moving off paper actually gains you

Clubs usually do this to stop someone standing at a desk answering the phone. The more durable benefits are less obvious:

What usually goes wrong

A reasonable first week

  1. Enter each court as a resource, with its real capacity
  2. Create one bookable hour, and a two-hour option if you sell one
  3. Set peak and off-peak prices by day and time
  4. Enter the regular weekly bookings before opening to anyone
  5. Block league nights, coaching and maintenance
  6. Share the link with the regulars first — they will find the problems

Thrivfully models courts as resources with real capacity, supports peak and off-peak pricing, and handles clubs running several courts across more than one location. See how it works.