Court Booking Your Members Will Actually Use

Booking windows are the club politics, encoded

Every squash club has an understanding about who gets the good courts. Full members before off-peak members, members before guests, nobody hogging Tuesday at seven every week for a year. On a paper sheet this is enforced socially, which works until it does not, and then it becomes a committee matter.

Encoding it as booking windows and limits removes the club secretary from the middle of it. Full members open seven days out, off-peak members three, guests two; a member can hold at most two future peak bookings. The rules become invisible infrastructure rather than a source of friction, and the membership tiers gain a concrete benefit that justifies the price difference.

Box leagues belong in the court calendar

The box league is the social engine of most squash clubs, and it is almost always run as a separate artefact — a sheet of boxes, a results email, a WhatsApp group where players arrange matches. The court booking then happens independently, which means league matches compete for courts with ordinary hire and occasionally lose.

When an arranged box match books an actual court slot, the fixture and the reservation stop being two different facts about the same evening. Players see their match in the same place they see their court time, and the club can see how much of its court inventory the league genuinely consumes.

Daytime courts are the club’s unsold inventory

A squash club with four courts open twelve hours a day has around forty-eight court-hours daily. Membership demand realistically consumes the evening block and weekend mornings. The weekday daytime hours — a substantial share of total capacity — are typically unsold entirely.

Opening those hours to non-member hire at a published rate is the least disruptive revenue a squash club can add, because it uses capacity the membership was never going to touch. It only works if a non-member can discover the price and book without joining, phoning, or being let in by someone.

• Publish an off-peak public rate for weekday daytime courts
• Keep peak evenings members-only so nothing is taken from subscribers
• Track daytime utilisation separately to see whether the experiment worked