Activity booking and facility/staff management

Tallington Lakes is a leisure home park and outdoor activity centre on the Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire county borders. Set close to 205 acres of clean spring water fed lakes; Tallington Lakes offers a range of waterspouts including water skiing, wakeboarding, jet skiing, dinghy sailing, windsurfing and canoeing. You can even walk on the water in one of their water zorbs! There is also a dry ski slope, and a 15 metre climbing tower on the park.

Client brief

Chas at Tallington Lakes approached us wanting to develop an online booking system for the all of the activites at his resort. He hadnt been able to find an off the shelf software system that could meet his needs because he had a number of core requirements that couldn't be met by one software provider. These were:

• Customers can make online bookings for 1 activity session or book multiple sessions, for example a set of six skiing lessons.
• Allocate staff to certain activities and ensure that activites can only be booked online if they have the staff to cover the sessions.
• Equipment hire to accompany the session booked needs to be selected by the customer based on their size e.g. kayaks.

Software functionality and application

Admin Site

• Secure login via username and password.
• Set up and manage administrators and permisssions.
• Set up and manage activity types (e.g. Kayaks, Waterskiing), tickets (e.g. adult £20, child £10) and capacity (e.g. 5 adults/5 children per hour).
• Set up and manage staff members, their supported activities and working times.
• Set up and manage availability calendar for each activity (e.g. Kayaks available 0900 – 1730 Mon-Fri, 0900 – 1400 Saturday).
• View and update bookings, payments and customer details.
• Set up and manage e-mail templates for booking confirmation & cancellation.
• View reports on bookings and payments by activity type and date.

Public Site

• Display activities with availability calendar.  Availability is calculated from both the activity and staff availability. Once a staff member is assigned, they cannot be assigned on a separate activity at the same time, therefore the second activity becomes unavailable unless there is another staff member available.
• Customer selects date/time and number of adults & children (subject to activity limits and current bookings) then enters their details (name, address, telephone, car registration, etc.) and signs a disclaimer.
• Customer makes payment (we recommend Stripe or SagePay for payment collection) and booking is confirmed.  A confirmation e-mail is sent to the customer and copied to you.
• Booking system is styled to match your existing website and can be linked to via a simple “Book Now” button from your website.
• These are general features and can be refined to include further details (such as extra customer data you may want to capture) once we start working together.

Angelfish comments

This system had some quite complex requirements particularly around the management of skiing lessons with varying levels of expertise, and the ability to book multiple unrelated customers onto one session.