5 Tips to Coordinate Reservations for Recreation and Amenity Spaces

animated image with an iPad on a sky blue background next to a yellow coffee cup - the iPad cycles through tabbed amenity sign ups

Sometimes the first-come, first-serve model won’t cut it. No one likes having to show up super early to ensure they get a court, picnic shelter or a lane for swimming. It’s so much easier if everyone can simply reserve the time and date to match their preferences.

With an online sign up, you can list out time slots for reservations at recreation facilities like pools, tennis courts and park venues. This will give your audience the option to ensure they’ll have a spot when the time comes. When you create an online sign up for scheduling out your reservations, be sure to consider these five tips.

1. Automatically Generate Dates and Times for Reservations

We get it. No one enjoys entering a long list of dates and times on their sign up. It could take forever, and you’ve got better things to do. We understand the value of saving time. That’s why we created online sign ups.

With our time slot generating tool, you can enter the parameters for your time slots and our system will automatically generate those dates and times for you. Check out this helpful video to see how it works!

screenshot of time slot generator

2. Hide Some of the Dates

It’s a hassle to scroll through a long list of past dates to find a current date on your sign up. Also, listing out dates for the next six months may give someone a chance to reserve the same spot into infinity and not leave a fair opportunity for others.

With our hide dates feature, you can keep the dates on the sign up current by having the sign up automatically hide dates that are in the past, and hide dates that are far in the future. You can set the parameters to customize the range of visible dates and the sign up will take care of the rest.

screenshot of option to hide dates

Genius Tip: If you’re creating a yearlong sign up, you might find it easier to create a sign up on a monthly or quarterly basis, and then duplicate the sign up for the next period of time so that you can periodically start things fresh. 

3. Limit the Number of Slots a Person Can Reserve

We all know some people love to reserve things in advance. Unfortunately, they might love it so much that they reserve a few too many spots and don’t leave much room for others. To keep things fair, it’s best to limit the quantity of spots that a single person can reserve on a sign up.

With our quantity limit feature, you can determine the maximum number of slots a person can reserve on the sign up. For example, you might want to limit people to no more than three slots at a time on the sign up. If someone attempts to sign up for more than three, the system will prevent it and notify them that they have exceeded the allowable number.

screenshot of option to limit users to signing up for a maximum quantity on entire sign up

4. Consider Linking Multiple Sign Ups Together

If you have multiple types of facilities such as pickleball courts and swimming lanes, you may want to create a distinct sign up page for each activity. You can then link multiple sign up pages together into selectable tabs with our tabbing feature.

This way, your audience can visit a single page and then select the tab they’d like to reserve in order to view the sign up opportunities on that particular tab. This makes your sign ups easy for an audience to locate, and with a single link, it’s easy to share.

screenshot of a pickleball court sign up tabbed together with other amenity sign ups

5. Remove Ads for a Professional Look

Ads allow us to provide a free Basic level of our site to anyone. However, we understand that some people need a clean professional-looking sign up page that is free of advertisements.

So, we offer an option to remove ads from sign ups to all of our Premium subscribers. For as little as $9.99/month, you can remove ads and take advantage of a host of other premium features on your sign up. You can cancel your subscription at any time.

screenshot of ads versus no ads on a tennis court reservation sign up

Finally, a simple solution that creates a win-win for you and your group! Well, those who enjoy showing up three hours early to snag a court might be disappointed. But the rest will be singing your praises. Get started creating your reservation sign up today!

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