Padel court booking: by the hour, past midnight, with no clashes

Why a court is not a salon

In a salon the unit is a service: a 30 minute cut, a two hour colour. On a court the unit is an hour, and the service is the court itself. That small difference changes everything that follows.

You also have three or four courts running at the same moment, each with its own price and length: padel at 90 minutes, football at 60. So what you need is not one schedule, it is a schedule per court on the same screen.

And your demand is not spread across the day. Late afternoon to dinner is steady, 8 to 12 is the peak, and past midnight is real business in summer. Thursday looks nothing like Sunday. Ramadan turns the whole day over: nothing before iftar, and play from after taraweeh until suhoor.

Any system that does not understand those four things, the hour as a unit, several courts, a night that runs long, and seasons that move your hours, will send you back to paper on the first Thursday.

Double bookings, and how they are solved

The recurring problem with courts comes down to one scene: two people ask about the same court at 10 pm in the same minute, so you answer both, or you answer one and forget to close the slot for the other. The result is two teams standing at the gate.

The fix is not a faster reply, it is the slot closing itself. The moment a player books an hour on a court, that hour disappears from the available times for that court for anyone who opens the page afterwards, and the database itself refuses two bookings on the same court at the same time.

Keep your expectation in the right place: this stops two teams holding one hour, it does not stop a team that books and never comes. That is a separate problem, handled with a reminder before the slot and a "no-show" mark on the booking so you can see who repeats it.

Pricing: a price per court, and a length per court

Each court goes in with its name, its photo, its price per hour and the length of its slot. So you can price the covered court differently from the open one, set padel at 90 minutes and football at 60, and the times shown to a player follow the length of the court he picked.

Work out your capacity before you price. If you open from 4 pm to 2 am, that is 10 hours, so around 6 padel slots a night per court. Three courts gives you 18 slots, and at 120 SAR a slot the ceiling for the night is 2,160 SAR.

That ceiling is theoretical and never met. In reality a few hours a night fill and the rest sit empty. So the question worth asking is this: how many of the 18 slots a night actually filled last week? That division is your occupancy, and it tells you whether to raise the peak price or lower the one before it.

And if you want to try a lower price outside the peak without changing your published rate, make a discount code and share it with the player groups for early bookings, then switch it off whenever you like.

Nights that run past 12, and seasons

Midnight is a technical problem before it is an operating one. Schedules usually count a day from 00:00 to 23:59, so a 1 am booking lands on the following day and gets cut off from its own night.

The right way on WGTK is to set a closing time earlier than the opening time, 4 pm to 2 am, so the system reads the day as crossing midnight, an "after midnight" mark appears next to it, and the 1 am booking stays on its night in your day view.

Seasons save you from rewriting your hours every year. You create a season named Ramadan with its start and end dates and its hours, it applies to all the courts, and your normal hours come back by themselves when it ends. Summer works the same way when play moves to later hours. A season runs 120 days at most.

For maintenance and holidays, closed days block specific dates up to two months ahead with a written reason such as maintenance. Bookings already on those dates stay as they are, so you move or cancel them yourself from the bookings page.

What the reports tell you about your peak hours

After a month of use you have something the notebook never gave you: a number for every hour. The reports show revenue for the period, the most requested court, the busiest hour and the busiest day of the week, who showed up and who did not, and returning customers against new ones.

The decisions that come out of those numbers are practical. If your peak turns out to be 9 to 11 pm on Thursday and Friday, those hours do not need marketing, they need a price that reflects what they are worth. If 4 to 6 pm sits empty on weekdays, you either sell it to a different audience at a lower rate, such as academy and school sessions, or you accept it as dead time and stop thinking about it.

The share of returning customers is the second number worth a look. A club whose bookings come mostly from regular teams is a different business from one living on new faces every week, and the first can carry a price rise more easily than the second.

Note that reports on WGTK are open during the trial and on both paid plans, and every booking is kept from day one, so its numbers are there.