St Margaret’s Pastures is a multi-sport venue with 4 x 7/5 a side ⚽ 3G football pitches, a multi-use games area 🏀🏐, a pavilion with changing facilities 🚿, and a café ☕ serving delicious hot and cold drinks to have in or take away. Located in the heart of the city, next to the beautiful Abbey Park 🌳.

We spoke to Amy Latimer, Centre Manager at St Margaret's Pastures Sports Centre about Pitchbooking, and it's implementation at her club.

"At our sports club, we offer a wide range of facilities and services, and I play a key role in overseeing day-to-day operations. Before discovering Pitchbooking, we were facing several critical issues that were impacting both our efficiency and user experience. We had limited online traffic, which meant we received a lot of phone calls for bookings, and many of these weren’t followed up because people hadn’t paid in advance. Additionally, our booking options were inflexible, and it was hard for users to find available time slots or upgrade their bookings at the last minute."

"We also struggled with confusing back-end processes related to pricing and reporting, which placed an extra burden on our staff. Furthermore, customers couldn’t pay for multiple sessions in a single transaction, which led to complications for those booking multiple time slots. All of these factors combined made our booking system inefficient and difficult to manage."

How Pitchbooking Helped Us Overcome These Challenges

"When we started using Pitchbooking, things immediately improved. The platform's user interface is intuitive and accessible, making it easy for our users to see available booking times and quickly add extra time to their sessions if needed. This flexibility has led to an increase in online bookings and more return users."

"Another huge benefit is the ease of managing facility closures, pricing updates, and scheduling through the Pitchbooking interface. What used to be a complicated back-end process has now become streamlined and stress-free. The ability to record payments for multiple bookings at once has saved us time and hassle, both for our staff and our customers."

Four Key Benefits We’ve Experienced

Visual Accessibility and Clarity: "Pitchbooking’s daily calendar is far more user-friendly than our previous system. It’s easy to see which bookings are confirmed, which were paid online, and when bookings are scheduled. We also appreciate Pitchbooking’s Accessibility Mode View mode, which was lacking in our old system."

Simplified Staff Training: "Onboarding new staff is now much faster, thanks to Pitchbooking’s straightforward design. This saves us time and ensures that new employees can quickly adapt to using the platform."

Improved Customer Experience: "With our old system, in-person checkouts often caused delays, especially during busy times. Now, the payment process is much quicker, reducing pressure on staff and ensuring that bookers can start using the facilities right on time, with no bottlenecks at reception."

Increased Bookings and Revenue Growth: "Pitchbooking’s user-friendly design has not only improved our internal processes but also increased our bookings. Since the platform is so easy to use, we’ve seen more people booking and paying online, which has lightened our staff’s workload. Additionally, last-minute cancellations are now quickly rebooked by other users, increasing our facility usage and generating extra revenue."

Would We Recommend Pitchbooking? Absolutely.

"We would highly recommend Pitchbooking to any sports community club looking for a reliable booking solution. The onboarding process was seamless, and the Pitchbooking team helped us resolve several unique challenges, such as managing VAT for our club. Our dedicated rep is always on hand to ensure that things run smoothly, and the regular updates to features like the Daily Calendar and Payments Table show that the team is actively improving the platform based on user feedback."

"For us, Pitchbooking has been a game-changer, making both the management of our facilities and the customer experience far more efficient and enjoyable."

Amy Latimer

Centre Manager