We’ve identified a couple of issues specific to venues with the ‘Book a Court’ hardware and would like to share these in detail with you and provide assurance that we’re working on a resolution with our software and hardware providers.

 1. Lights turning off prematurely or incorrect times for bookings

This issue is related to changes being made within the booking data that is modifying the validation times for lights to be active – in most cases we’ve investigated the modifications are being set to an earlier booking, meaning lights are turning off earlier than expected, despite booking pins being entered successfully.

The issue is unique to certain scenarios and we’re still working to understand what all these scenarios are, but believe we’ve identified the root cause and will now work to deploy the necessary fix.

Note: not all lighting issues that occur are due to this, so please continue to:

• encourage bookers to always enter their pin, regardless if the gate is unlocked for competition or coaching, or even if their court lights are already on, this is to ensure the best possible chance that there will be no interruption with their booking,
• check that the court light switches are set correctly (i.e. light switch is set to ‘AUTO’)
• ensure the sunset switch is not being bypassed and/or is functioning correctly (this may require your electrician to investigate).

For further details on how the court lighting works with the ‘Book a Court’ system, please click here.

If this issue is frequently occurring at your venue, you may decide to operate lights manually until a resolution is available. To report the issue for our team to investigate and confirm, please ensure you provide the following information:

• Your club and contact details
• Explanation of what happened (e.g. “court 1-4 lights went out at xx, but should have remained on, light switches were correctly set to AUTO”)
• Details of the booking impacted (i.e. booking contact, times, dates)
• Other details we may need to know (e.g. “no other booking was impacted” or “lights worked perfectly on court 1”, “this occurs only on a Monday”)

We’re also looking to combine this fix with other work that we’re currently involved in to further reduce the “booking delay” and provide further improvements to the gate and light logic. This is currently our highest priority and we’re aiming to have this delivered within the next few weeks, however, understanding that significant testing is required and is to be successful before we deploy the changes.

 2. Contacts being issued a booking pin of ‘0’.

For an unknown reason, contacts were being assigned the booking pin of ‘0’ rather than a unique 4-digit pin as expected.

Good news is that this issue was resolved on March 10th, meaning the issue will not occur moving forward. Contacts/members that were given a ‘0’ digit booking pin will be issued a new 4-digit pin and this work is likely to commence in the next week.

Please note: the booking pin of ‘0’ will still grant access and will also activate lights, so it doesn’t present any issues to users who have made a booking or intend to make a booking prior to being issued the new 4-digit pin.

We will communicate necessary updates and hope to have these rectified as early as possible. We thank you for your understanding and appreciate your patience to rectify.

If you have any further questions or need to report an issue, please contact our Customer Support team via email on [email protected] or call 1800 752 983 with all the necessary information.

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!