A sports club booking system that counts in half-hours, not rounded hours
Tennis Agadir Training took its court reservations by phone and copied them into a spreadsheet. We built everything from nothing: the brand, a site in five languages, online court booking, the manager’s planning board, an installable app and the CRM behind the enquiries.
- Client
- Agadir Tennis
- Year
- 2023
- Project type
- Brand, website and custom booking platform
- Sector
- Sport and leisure club
The client
Tennis Agadir Training runs four courts and sells three things that are not bought the same way: court time by the hour, a school for children and adults, and camps for juniors and adults. The member comes back every week, the visitor books once, and the family on a camp decides well before it arrives.
The brief pointed at the Rafael Nadal Academy as its reference: the club wanted to be read as a serious training destination, not as a place that rents courts by the hour.
What was in the way
- Reservations handled by phone and spreadsheet, with no shared view of what was actually free.
- Half-hours lost on every rounding: a ninety-minute booking written down as two hours is thirty minutes nobody can sell.
- Course, camp and school enquiries scattered across an inbox, with no way to tell which ones were followed up.
- Demand coming from abroad — tourists and visiting families who search, compare and decide before they land.
- No site of its own, and no idea which searches players actually type when they are looking for somewhere to play.
How we worked
Four stages, in order. Nothing was built before the research said what to build.
Research
Interviews with the club’s management, observation of how bookings were actually taken, and a search-demand study across French and English to size what the club could realistically capture.
Definition and scoping
Two journeys defined separately — the member who books weekly and the visitor who books once — then a scope written around what shortens both, and an explicit list of what we would not build.
Design
Brand identity, graphic charter and art direction, then the interface: a three-step booking flow, a planning board built for a manager standing at the desk, and a navigation that keeps the booking button in reach at any scroll depth.
Production
Build and launch in five languages, the booking engine across the four courts, email and WhatsApp notifications, the CRM connected to every form, the installable app, and content written for the queries the research had confirmed.
A club website with booking built in
This is what a visitor meets on a full screen: the identity we created for the club, the four courts, the school and the camps, and a booking button that stays in reach however far down the page you scroll.
The site and the booking engine were built in the same project, so a court is booked inside the site rather than on a separate tool the player has to be sent to. Everything the rest of this page shows — the three steps, the confirmation, the planning board — sits behind that one button.
- The brand, the site and the booking engine built as one project
- A booking button in reach at any scroll depth, on every page
- One site serving a full screen and a phone from the same content
Three steps, and the court is booked
The player picks a court, then a date, a length and one of the slots still free, then fills four fields. That is the whole journey. Everything that can be asked later is asked later.
- Slot lengths of one hour, ninety minutes or two hours, chosen by the player
- Availability computed in half-hour steps, so leftovers stay bookable
- Rules set court by court — opening hours, lengths offered, closures
The whole journey fits on a phone screen
The phone was not an adaptation added at the end of the project, it was the starting point of the journey. The same three steps, and nothing more: pick one of the four courts, set the date, the length and the slot, then confirm and get the summary. No account to create, nothing to install.
The slot screen is the one that matters: it shows the hours genuinely free on that court and greys out the rest. A slot already taken cannot be selected, and what the player sees is the same availability the club sees on its own board.
- Three steps from first tap to confirmation
- Only the hours actually free on that court are selectable
- Four fields, no account, no download
- Confirmation on screen, then by email and WhatsApp
From the site into the player’s calendar
The confirmation screen writes the slot straight into Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Apple, in one tap, and the same recap goes out by email and on WhatsApp. One booking, three places it can be found again: on screen, in the inbox, in the calendar.
Every confirmation carries a cancel button. Cancelling is made easy on purpose: a slot released the day before goes straight back on sale, where a no-show cannot be recovered at all.
A message for every status, not just one
A booking is not one event, it is a sequence of states: confirmed, moved, reminded, cancelled, court closed. A club that sends only the first message leaves the player guessing on all the others, and the phone starts ringing again.
So each status has its own message, on both channels, written so the subject line alone is enough. The club is notified too: a booking taken at midnight is on the manager’s screen at opening time, without anyone typing it in.
- Confirmed — recap, calendar, one-tap cancel
- Moved — the new slot, the old one back on sale
- Reminder — sent before the slot
- Cancelled — freed on the board at once
- Court closed — the club warns, not the weather
- Received — the club gets the same event
Four courts on a single planning board
The manager sees every court at once or one at a time, switching between day, week, month, list and timeline — and books, moves or blocks a slot without leaving the screen.
This is where the half-hours are recovered: nothing has to be rounded up any more, because nothing has to be written down by hand.
Talk to us about your own schedulingFive languages, and one tap to the club
French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. A visiting family compares clubs before it lands, and it compares in its own language — so every page, every form and every confirmation exists in all five.
A floating shortcut opens WhatsApp, a phone call, an email or directions, so a player with one question in hand picks the channel they already use instead of a contact form.
First on the searches players actually type
Search was not an afterthought bolted on at the end — it shaped what we built. The keyword study came first, in French and in English, and told us which intents a club of this size could realistically win. The site architecture, the page titles and the internal linking were then written around those intents.
Courts, lessons, school and camps each got their own page and their own query, instead of competing for the same one. That is what stops a site from cannibalising itself — and it is why the club held first place on several queries at once, not only on its own name, when we last measured in June 2026.
- Keyword and demand study in French and English, before a line was written
- One page, one intent — courts, lessons, school and camps never compete
- Titles, meta descriptions and headings written for the query, not for us
- Internal linking that routes a visitor from a search to the page that answers it
- Content produced in five languages, so foreign demand lands on its own version
We built the brand too, not just the software
The club had no visual identity of its own. Everything below was created for this project.
- Brand identity and logo system
- Graphic charter — colour, typography, spacing
- Art direction across the site and the booking flow
- Editorial line in French and English
Delivered in the same project
Every item below is in production today.
An installable app
A progressive web app: members add the club to their home screen and open it like any app — no app store, no download, no second build to maintain.
A CRM behind the enquiries
Lesson, camp and school enquiries stop living in an inbox: each one is recorded, assigned and followed through until it gets an answer.
A form per programme
Every camp, lesson and school programme has its own form, asking only what that programme needs. All of them land in the same CRM.
Email campaigns and follow-ups
The club writes to its own member list — announcements, camp openings, follow-ups — and the repetitive sends go out on their own.
Membership managed online
Membership is requested, tracked and renewed online. The club knows who is up to date without keeping a second file on the side.
Recurring bookings
The same slot, every week, set once — what a regular member wants, and what no spreadsheet holds together for very long.
A board per coach
Each coach gets their own board: their lessons, their availability, their blocked slots. The club sees all of them, a coach sees theirs.
An internal club ranking
An interactive leaderboard on the club’s own site — a reason to come back between sessions, not only when there is a court to book.
Five languages
French, English, German, Spanish and Italian, on one site and one content model — not five sites to keep in step with each other.
Results
Each figure carries the tool it comes from and the period it covers. A number without either is an opinion.
Mission summary
Built with
- WordPress
- PHP
- MySQL
- Google Analytics
- Search Console
- Semrush
- Google Ads
- Socle de réservation sur mesure
- PWA
- CRM
The team on the project
- Senior UX designer
- SEO and traffic manager
- Front-end developer
- WordPress specialist
Related services
What clubs ask us
Timelines, budget, adding booking to an existing site, data ownership: what club managers and directors want settled before a project starts.
How long does it take to put a slot booking system in place?
It depends on the number of courts, the number of offers to sell — rentals, lessons, camps — and on what already exists. We always start with a scoping stage that fixes the perimeter and the schedule before a line of code is written. A date comes out of that stage, not out of a phone call.
What does a custom booking system cost?
The price follows the perimeter: how many courts, how many kinds of slot, how many languages, whether a CRM and a planning board are part of it. We quote after the scoping stage, on a written perimeter — a figure given before anyone has looked at how your bookings are actually taken is a figure that will move.
Do we have to rebuild the whole site, or can we add booking only?
Both are possible. A booking engine can be grafted onto an existing site when its technical base allows it, and we check that before proposing anything. This club had no site at all, so the brand, the site and the booking system were built together.
Can several courts follow different rules?
Yes. Each court carries its own configuration: the slot lengths offered, opening hours, closures and maintenance windows. That is what lets an indoor surface and an outdoor one stop obeying the same rules.
What happens if two players book the same slot?
Nothing, because it cannot happen: a slot leaves the availability list the moment it is taken. The selection screen only ever shows hours that are genuinely free on that court, so a double booking has nowhere to occur.
Do players have to create an account?
No. The journey is four fields, with no account and nothing to install. An account makes sense for a member who books every week; it makes none for a visitor booking once. Requiring one from everybody adds a step the club has not yet earned.
Does the club keep control of its own planning?
Entirely. The manager books, moves or blocks a slot straight from the planning board, without going through the public journey. A phone booking, a lesson moved, a tournament, a closure for works — each is a few seconds of work.
Who owns the member data?
The club does. The data stays yours, exportable at any time, and we neither resell nor exploit it. It is worth asking any provider the same question: for some booking platforms, that data is part of the business model.
Does this only apply to tennis?
No. The problem is the same anywhere time is sold on a surface: padel, five-a-side, squash, bowling, a pool, a gym, a music studio. What changes is the slot lengths and the rules around them, not the principle.
Same problem, different court?
If you run a club, an academy or any venue that sells time on a court, a pitch or a lane, you sell the same thing: slots. And a slot recorded badly is never recovered.
We build booking, scheduling and membership systems for clubs, academies and sports centres. Tell us how your bookings are taken today.
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