Every court, turf and studio has the same shape of week. A few hours sell out. Many hours sit empty. The busy hours pay the bills, but the empty ones are where your growth is hiding.
You cannot add more evenings to the week. You can make the quiet hours more attractive. The simplest tool for that is time-band pricing: different prices for different times, set by you.
1. What time bands are
A time band is a block of time with its own price. Weekday mornings might be one band. Weekday evenings another. Weekends a third. Each band can also have its own slot length, so you can sell one-hour slots in the evening and longer slots during the day.
In Venue Manager, you set time bands for any day pattern on each court or pitch, each with its own price and slot length. Customers see the right price for the slot they pick, online and at the counter. See bookings and pricing.
2. Find your quiet hours first
Do not guess where the gaps are. Look at your bookings for the last few months and mark, for each day of the week, which hours are usually full, which are half full and which are empty.
Venue Manager's bookings dashboard shows your busiest hours, along with revenue, payment mix and refunds. Read it the other way round, too: the hours that never appear near the top are your quiet hours. See reports and dashboards.
You will usually find three groups:
- Prime hours that sell out without effort.
- Shoulder hours next to prime time that sell some weeks and not others.
- Quiet hours, often weekday mornings and early afternoons, that rarely sell.
3. Set bands that match those groups
Start with three or four bands, not ten. Too many prices confuse customers and staff.
- Keep your prime-hour price where it is, or raise it slightly if those hours always sell out.
- Set shoulder hours a little lower, so people who are flexible move into them.
- Set quiet hours clearly lower, low enough that someone notices.
Change one thing at a time and give it a few weeks. Then look at the same hours again. If a quiet band starts to fill, you can ease the discount back. If nothing moves, price alone is not the answer for that slot, and the ideas below may help more.
4. Think about who can come at quiet times
A cheaper price helps only if someone is free to play. Weekday afternoons will not suit office workers, whatever the price. They may suit:
- Students and young players after school.
- Retired and part-time players.
- Coaches running private sessions.
- Corporate groups looking for a team activity.
- Shift workers whose day off is midweek.
Price the quiet band for the people who can actually come, and tell them about it directly.
5. Sell per person, not per court
A whole court is hard to fill at 3 PM. A single place on a shared court is much easier. Per-person pricing lets you sell shared nets or open-play courts by the head, with a cap on how many people can join.
This works well for cricket nets, open badminton sessions and pickleball drop-ins. One player books a place, then another, and the hour that would have stayed empty earns something.
6. Host open games
Open games take per-person selling further. You host a pickup game on a quiet slot. Players join and pay for a seat, online or at the venue. You set the number of seats, the price and the skill range, so games stay well matched.
Captains can bring a team and split the cost, with a link for each player. Walk-ins can be added at the desk. After the game, players rate each other, which helps the next game match better. See games.
7. Use offers that only apply to quiet hours
Sometimes you want a promotion without changing your price list. A coupon is better for that, as long as it applies only where you want it.
In Venue Manager, you can limit a coupon to specific courts, days and hours. Add a minimum order, a cap on the discount, and limits on total and per-person use. For example, a weekday afternoon code that works only on your outdoor courts. Coupon use shows on your dashboard. See coupons and loyalty.
8. Lock in regulars
Single bookings fill one hour. Regular bookings fill the same hour every week.
Season bookings let a team book a weekly slot for months in one go, checked for clashes first. Offer a fair rate for a quiet weekday slot, and a team may take it for the whole season.
Memberships can be tied to times as well as hours. A slot membership plan can set its own timings and allowed courts, so you can sell a daytime plan at a lower price than an all-hours plan. See slot memberships.
Private rates let you give a negotiated price to a club or school without showing it on your public price list.
9. Tell people the price exists
A cheaper band nobody knows about fills nothing. Put your time bands on your website, where customers book, so they see the lower price next to the slot. Send a message to the groups most likely to come, using labels in your WhatsApp inbox.
10. A simple plan
- Find your prime, shoulder and quiet hours from real bookings.
- Set three or four time bands to match.
- Add per-person selling or open games for the quietest slots.
- Run one targeted offer with an end date.
- Offer season bookings and daytime memberships to regulars.
- Review after a few weeks and adjust.
Time-band pricing is part of Slots, our product for courts, turf and studios. Each paid plan is free for 15 days, and you can extend by 15 more days from inside the app. See the pricing page.
Run your venue on Sporfy Venue Manager.
Try every feature free for 15 days.