A group training session, a holiday training camp, a padel evening, a cardio tennis class. Until now, filling these time slots meant keeping a list on the side: a sheet pinned up at the club, a messaging group, sign-ups written down by hand and then copied over.
With participatory bookings, the time slot fills itself. You book the court with a label, set the number of places, and your users sign themselves up from the schedule. If the activity is paid, they pay for their place online right away.
The full step-by-step guide is in the documentation: Participatory bookings: opening a time slot to participation.
It all starts with a booking you already know: a time slot booked in the club's name, with a label such as “Adult training” or “Half-term camp”.
In the Labels tab of the booking form, a new option appears: Participatory booking. Turn it on, and the time slot stops being a mere coloured block on the schedule. It becomes an activity your users can sign up for.
On the schedule, the time slot shows how full it is, for example 3 / 8 participants. Everyone can see at a glance whether there is room left, without even opening the booking.
You can also sign participants up when you create it, by ticking them in the list of users. Handy for placing a group's regulars before opening the remaining places to the rest of the club.
The Configure button opens the participatory booking settings. Each one answers a simple question.
Do you run the same training session every week, or several groups with identical settings? Give your configuration a name in Save as template. Next time, choose that template: all the settings fill themselves in.
The user clicks the time slot on the schedule. The booking details open: the activity, the date, the places left and, unless you have hidden it, the list of participants.
One click on Join, a confirmation, and it's done. If they change their mind, Unsubscribe takes them off the list, within the deadline you have set. After that deadline, the application asks them to contact the club.
When sign-up is not possible, the application says so clearly: the time slot is full, sign-ups are not open yet, the profile does not match the criteria. Nobody is left in front of a button that leads nowhere.
The user receives an e-mail confirmation, according to their own notification preferences. With Enable Notifications, the time slot's organiser is told about every sign-up, every withdrawal, and when the time slot is full. If a participant withdraws after paying for their place, the e-mail says so: it is up to you to decide on a possible refund.
A five-day camp, a cycle of ten sessions, a training session every Tuesday of the season: these activities are booked as a series, using repeat bookings.
The scope of a participation decides what a click commits to. With This booking, the user signs up for one session, and comes back for the next. With All recurrences, a single sign-up covers all upcoming sessions: the right setting for a camp or a cycle followed from start to finish.
In the second case, the booking details list the dates of the series. Everyone knows exactly what they are committing to.
If your club uses OpenResa online billing, one more setting appears: Payments & Billing. Link the time slot to a product from your catalogue, a training camp, a lesson or a tournament, and participation becomes paid.
The price is shown in the booking details. By clicking Join, the user goes straight to payment, and their place is reserved as soon as the payment is received. If they left the page along the way, a Complete payment button awaits them in the time slot details.
Your product's conditional prices apply to each user: one price depending on the subscription, another depending on age. Every user sees and pays the price that applies to them. Need a single price for a particular session? Tick Customize the amount in the time slot settings.
Each paid participation appears in Administration›Dashboard›Billing›Invoices & Transactions, like any other club sale.
Not everyone signs up online. Some drop by the front desk, others pay at the office. From the booking details, the Add participants button lets you sign up several at once.
On a paid time slot, you then choose how their participation is settled:
The same choice is offered when you create the time slot, for the participants you sign up straight away.
In the list of participants, each person can be replaced or removed. A click on the status of their participation lets you collect what is still due, or send their invoice by e-mail again.
A training session for two when it needs six means a court blocked for nothing and a coach travelling for very little.
Turn on Automatically Cancel and choose a lead time, for example 24 hours. If the minimum number of participants has not been reached 24 hours before the start, the time slot is cancelled and the court freed. Participants and the organiser receive an e-mail explaining why.
Orders awaiting payment are cancelled at the same time: nobody will pay for a session that will not take place. A participation that has already been paid stays recorded in your billing, and any refund is made from the order, case by case.
A time slot created less than 24 hours before it starts is never cancelled automatically. You don't withdraw a session you have only just offered.
To launch your first participatory time slot, book a court in the club's name, open the Labels tab and turn on Participatory booking.
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