Is there a perfect price to charge customers who are looking to rent your sports facility?

How can you balance the need to generate revenue with the need to provide an affordable resource for your customers and local community?

What factors should you take into consideration when setting your pricing? Competition? Quality? On Peak / Off Peak? Time of year? Concession rates?

From working with over 1000+ sports facilities and sports events across the UK, Ireland and further afield, our expertise and data insights can help you set up your facilities for success.

How muuch revenue should my facility generate per year?

How much revenue your sports facility can generate depends on two main variables - How much emphasis do you place on revenue, and how professionally do you operate the bookings and payments for your facility?

Different Pitchbooking customers can have different goals. If you are a charity organisation, or perhaps a community club, your focus will not be on maximising revenue and profits, but there will be a charitable and inclusion aspect to your pricing. Similarily, even for profit businesses often put some emphasis on social programmes, such as free sessions or charitable rates for fundraisers.

The amount you can charge will also depend heavily on the type of facility you have available - for example the size of the pitch you offer is important, as well as how much local competition you have with other facilities nearby.

However, making your operations more professional is something that every sports facility can optimise for.

Can you take bookings 24/7?
Do you sign customers up to long term block bookings?
Do you regularly advertise your available times to potential customers?
Are local individuals and teams aware of your facilities?

What price discounts should I offer at my sports facility?

Block booking discounts are confortable the most popular discount method. Well over 50% of Pitchbooking facilities utilise this pricing rule to incentivise customers to set up block bookings. The benefits are obvious - stable and predictable income for the facility, as well as enabling the customer to secure their desired slot for the long term.

Concession Rates are typically utilised for under 18 or charity events. The exact discount rate is often set on a case by case basis, from 10% off right through to offering sessions and games for no charge at all.

Off Peak Pricing typically offers a discount for bookings placed outside the typical 'busy' periods at your facilities. A reduction in price during the typical 9-5 work week for example, or Sundays can encourage additional customers to place a booking during these less 'competitive' timings.

Seasonal Discounts are most commonly utilised to offer discounts during the off-season (primarily summer in the UK and Ireland). Another common situation we see Seasonal Discounts for is for facilities with floodlights. These are typically very popular during the winter months - and look to generate additional demand in the summer.

In our Pitchbooking software, the ability to charge different prices for a booking based off your own pricing rules and discounts is a central feature.

Aim to collect 100% of your revenue

It is almost impossible to collect 100% of the revenue you should be for your facilities without a proper admin system in place. We find that most facilities are in the 70%-80% range before onboarding with us.

This is because a percentage of your payments will always slip through the cracks with a manual process. Late cancellations, promises to pay next week that are forgotten, whatever the reasons, you need a way of tracking bookings and payments.

Pitchbooking is built with revenue collection in mind. Our features to help you up your revenue collection percentage include Invoices with "Pay Online" links, intelligent automatic retries on failed card payments, filtered lists of unpaid and overdue bookings.All included in our software, all to help you collect payment.

Takeaways

As a Sports Facility Manager, you have to find the right balance for your facilities between generating revenue and non-commercial goals. But it is always worthwhile looking to collect the correct amount for the bookings that are actually taking place.

We believe every Facility Manager should compare their bookings data and the money actually received at least once a year. Fixing the difference between these two numbers will move the needle more than any marketing capaign, or pricing structure refresh. You should prioritise making it super easy for your customers to pay you, and put admin in place to easily keep on top of these processes.