'Advance bookings' are the first wave of bookings a facility takes. They must be submitted and confirmed before remaining slots can be opened to the wider public.
A new football season has begun.
Lush pitches, bright autumn mornings and that irresistible air of opportunity… There’s a reason we come back every year. But it’s not all poetry. Dig beneath that pristine surface, and you’ll see an admin storm raging.
Teams and councils are scrambling to get advance bookings in place, and everybody needs something different. This process is nearly always painful and often messy, but the season couldn’t run without it.
Advance booking is of the thorniest areas we came across when we began our partnership with Oxford City Council. Below, we look at what we’ve learned and the solution we’ve engineered.
Quick context
Advance bookings are crucial both to teams and council facility managers.
Teams need guaranteed, protected access to their home spaces for fixtures and weekly sessions. Managers, on the other hand, must cement these regular weekly bookings – typically their facilities’ main revenue stream – and establish a framework for the coming year.
How advance booking currently works
Processes vary, but advance bookings are normally done via paper correspondence.
Ahead of the new season, or perhaps at intervals through the season, the council issues registration forms. Teams fill these out with their league fixtures and training sessions. The council then writes back to confirm the slots allocated, sends out invoices and starts work gathering payments.
During the season, the council must confirm their advance slots each week before pitches can be opened to ad-hoc bookings. They need to put together a list of bookings, regular and ad-hoc, each week for every pitch. In practice, councils often cut the workload by using blanket pitch reservations for ‘home’ teams – pitches are off limits during ‘home’ hours, whether they’re being used or not.
A creaking mechanism
At its smoothest, paper correspondence takes time, often weeks, and means costly admin work. When things go awry.. well, there can be chaos.
With no concrete timetable attached, the paper can throw up uncertainty that lingers through the season. Exchanging written forms risks errors and confusion on both sides. Booking clashes are easy to miss and painful when they surface. An incorrect form, an office slip, and a team can end up missing a crucial fixture.
Then we have the question of payments. Once bookings are in place, managers have to pursue invoices – another time-consuming process which needs to be recorded and can cause confusion.
Finally, the blanket reservations often used for ‘home’ teams risk wasting resources, both for the council and the local community. Council pitches can feel inaccessible to those outside the local leagues. With an easier, simpler system, these spaces could be opened to a wider public and generate more income for their councils.
The Pitchbooking solution
How it works
Working with Oxford City council, we’ve built a special access feature into our on-line platform that makes advance booking quick, easy and flexible. Here’s how it works.
The facility manager gives teams priority access online to certain pitches and timeslots. The manager sets a window during which the team users have exclusive access to their priority slots. Payment, booking and confirmation are completed and clearly recorded online in the space of a few clicks.
Flexibility
We understand the many complex situations that arise with local teams’ bookings; our system is designed to give the greatest possible flexibility. The manager is free to grant whatever priorities are needed and change them whenever necessary. Of course, we’re always on-hand to offer support, and we’ve yet to find a team-council arrangement that the special access feature can’t cope with.
Less admin; more availability
Once the priority window closes, the pitch opens to bookings from the public – no more missed opportunities when teams don’t use their regular slots. All bookings feed into the on-line calendar; timetabling is now fully automated and clear.
Our system gives teams firm priority, but it also opens facilities to the public. What’s more, it saves hours of admin. With bookings and payments taken care of, facility managers are free to work more constructively.
Where we’re headed
With Oxford City council, we’ve seen that our model saves time and boosts bookings. Easy access means more people out playing; increased revenue allows better facilities. This is the upward spiral that we want to support in local communities across the country.