We’re pleased to announce that this afternoon we delivered an upgrade to the ‘Book a Court’ system with the primary aim of reducing the time it takes for a booking pin to become active from the time of booking.

What was the issue?

As you may know, it would take up to 30 minutes (sometimes longer) for a booking pin to become active from the time of booking – we understand the impact that this had on venues and player experiences and we appreciate your patience with us to work out a solution.

What is the upgrade?
In collaboration with Complete Security Solutions and ClubSpark, we’ve been able to deliver the first phase (of two phases) of this upgrade that, when fully delivered, it will ultimately be a new and improved process to sending/receiving booking data (to further reduce the delay), as well as a better user-experience regarding gate and lighting validation.

Has this been tested?
This upgrade has been in the works for a few months now. We’ve completed significant amount of testing over the last week and the tests have been successful.

The tests include replicating common booking scenarios (e.g. overlapping multi-court bookings, multiple coaching/competition bookings, etc) to ensure that there is no impact to the current behaviour and workings of gates and lights.

Whilst our test results show an improvement to the delay, we hope that we see this even further reduced when the full project is delivered in the new year.

What changes will I see?

You will see a difference to the time it takes a booking pin to become active. This is the only change you will see, there has been no changes to the software as part of this upgrade, nor any changes to the logic of the gates/lighting (i.e. known limitations will still exist and will be part of the second phase to this upgrade).

An example of a known limitation:

Booking for John on Courts 1 & 2 from 8-9pm

Booking for Tom on Courts 1-4 from 9-10pm

John enters pin at 7:50pm, gains access to Courts 1 & 2, lights turn on

Tom enters pin at 8:50pm, gains access to courts, court lights 1 & 2 are already on, court lights 3 & 4 turn on

John re-enters pin at 9pm

Lights on courts 1 & 2 turn off at 9:15pm

Tom will need to re-enter pin to turn the lights on court 1 & 2 again

What’s next?

We will continue to monitor the performance of this upgrade over the next 24-48 hours to ensure that everything is running as expected and if we happen to identify any issues, we have the ability to roll back the upgrade.

If you have any questions specific to this upgrade or if you’ve experienced anything that looks out of the ordinary, please let us know at [email protected]

Thank you & we hope you enjoy your holidays!