Development of Online Tennis Court Booking System
We have developed an online court booking system for a tennis centre.
Initial Objective:
Take bookings online for a tennis complex operating 52 weeks per year.
The Tennis Centre has 13 outdoor courts, some Astroturf and some clay surfaces.
Currently, the operation involves orders being taken over the phone or in person at the tennis centre. The operation also has tennis coaching clients who block book courts over the course of the year.
Brief:
- Take bookings online with a system allowing an “at a glance” view of court availability by court type on any given date.
- Allow bookings of up to two and a half hours, with the minimum booking being 1 hour with half-hour increments.
- Integrate bookings with an online payment gateway.
- Create accounts for customers to view existing and historic bookings.
- Produce and despatch invoices and booking details
- Allow administration of bookings via the CMS.
Development
Public Interface
- Users select their preferred date and type of court, in this instance: Astro-turf or Clay.
- The user is then taken to a page showing all the booked and available time periods for all of the courts in a single window.
- The system allows users to book consecutive and random time periods and pay for them online.
- Bookings selected are added to the shopping cart, and the user is invited to log in or register.
- Further bookings on the same or different dates can be made of any of the court types before the user pays for the bookings using credit or debit cards via a secure payment gateway; Barclays/HSBC/Paypal/ABNAMRO.
- The booking confirmation is despatched detailing court/s type and number, date/s and time/s, and booking fee.
- The tennis court availability is amended to display the new bookings.
- The booking transaction is independently confirmed by an email from the payment gateway.
- Each user establishes a default account at the point of the initial booking.
- The user can log in to their password-protected "account" using the email address used at registration.
- The account shows the court bookings and the user profile information they can change as their circumstances alter.
- Credit card information is not displayed nor retained during the booking process.
Pricing and booking Options
The system allows the pricing of each time period at a set price or, if required, with the price loaded with a minimum transaction fee and or time, with lesser rates for subsequent periods booked.
An example is that the minimum time period is one hour for £20.00 and further consecutive half hour time periods priced at £5.00.
The number of consecutive half-hour time periods booked at any one time may be capped if required.
Content Management System
Originally designed for one administrator, it has been further developed to accommodate multiple administrators with varying permission levels.
Example:
Administrator: Level 1 (Superuser) Allows full permissions, including deletion of records and bookings
Administrator: Level 2 Allows booking, amendment, and cancellation of bookings (soft cancellation)
Level 2 System Administrators can:
- Book courts and allocate them to existing customers.
- Make courts unavailable for identified periods (for maintenance, for example)
- View, edit or cancel and release existing customer bookings.
- Make discounted bookings against the retail price.
- Block-book courts over any given period with various permutations and identify chronological conflicts with the proposed booking over long periods.
Block-Booking permutations include:
- All or any court times from a start date to an end date.
- Specific hours every defined day, I.e. Tuesday and Thursday between 9 and 10.30 between February 14th to July 22nd.
Level 1 System Administrators (Superusers)
The superuser administrator can do all of the above and in addition:
- Create, Edit, suspend or delete Level 2 administrator profiles
- Delete bookings identified as cancellations by Level 2 administrators from the system.
Administrator Activity Logs
We further developed the module to allow for multiple administrators to create a security layer with a focus on the validation of bookings.
Cancellation and Deletion
A cancellation is a “soft” cancellation in that the cancellation is recorded against the administrator's ID.
Cancellations by Level 2 administrators are registered on the system, and the courts are released for resale.
The account which was previously associated with the ( now cancelled ) booking is updated to reflect the cancellation.
A deletion is a “hard delete” of the cancellations that can only be done by the Level 1 (Superuser) administrator.
This relates to all bookings, i.e. court bookings, amendments, cancellations, discounted bookings.
Reporting
The system logs and records all bookings via the public and the administrators.
Administrator bookings are:
- Identified by the administrator ID.
- Detail what method of payment is accepted by the administrator.
- Show the retail price and any discounted price compared to the full retail price.
Customer cancellations applied by the administrator are shown as cancelled in the customer history and reflected in users accounts.
Going Live:
The site goes live at the beginning of the season in April 2015
Adaptation
The system can be "plugged in" to other sites and adapted to other booking profiles such as a range of council amenities available for hire, private membership clubs, i.e. squash, bowling, cricket, community centre facility hire.
Just one of the many benefits of the system is that the user interface differentiates from many in that the court or facility availability is visual on any selected date as opposed to searching time and time again for a specific time and court.
For further information or to develop a bespoke online system or one that integrates with in-store EPOS systems, contact us for an initial discussion. We are very friendly.