This is usually the second question a venue asks us, right after they have worked out how much their current booking platform has taken off them this year. The answer is not a single number, but the sums behind it are simple enough that you can work out your own before you speak to anyone.
There are only two ways to pay for bookings
You either pay per booking, forever, or you pay once to build something and then pay to host and maintain it. Booking platforms are the first. A bespoke system is the second. Neither is automatically right, and which one wins depends almost entirely on your volume.
Platforms are attractive at the start because the cost is invisible. Nobody sends you an invoice for commission. It comes off the top, so it never feels like something you are spending. That is exactly why it goes unexamined for years.
Work out what you are paying now
Take your average booking value, multiply by the number of bookings you take in a week, multiply by 52, then multiply by whatever percentage your platform charges. Add the monthly licence on top.
A venue taking 200 bookings a week at an average of £25, on a platform charging 5%, is handing over about £13,000 a year. Take 400 bookings a week and it is £26,000. At that point you are paying more in commission than you would pay a part-time member of staff, for software that also tells you how to run your business.
Most owners we go through this with have never done the multiplication. The weekly figure looks trivial. The annual one rarely does.
What a bespoke system costs to build
A straightforward system, one resource type, live availability, deposits taken online and a back office for staff, generally lands in the low five figures. Something with several resource types, variable pricing, memberships, or an integration into a till or accounting system costs more, because there is more of it.
After that you are paying for hosting and maintenance rather than per booking. Hosting for a system like this is not expensive. Maintenance is the bit worth budgeting for properly, because software you rely on at the weekend needs somebody keeping it patched and available. Our maintenance packages cover that.
Where the money actually goes
Not where people expect. The customer-facing booking journey is usually the smaller half of the work. It has to be quick on a phone, because that is where nearly all bookings come from, but it is a fairly well understood problem.
The expensive half is your rules. Turnaround time between bookings. Peak and off-peak. Minimum party sizes. What happens when somebody wants to extend at 9pm on a Saturday. Which staff can override what. Every venue we have built for has had a handful of these that exist nowhere except in the head of whoever runs the floor, and getting them out and written down is most of the job.
The staff back office is the other thing people underestimate. Your team will use it hundreds of times a week. Customers use the booking form once. We build the back office alongside the front end for that reason, not after it.
When a platform is still the right call
If you are taking twenty bookings a week, build nothing. The commission is small, the platform does the job, and your money is better spent elsewhere. We tell people this regularly and it costs us work, but there is no point selling somebody a system that will not pay for itself.
Platforms also bring you customers who were not looking for you specifically. If a meaningful share of your bookings come from people discovering you through the marketplace rather than through your own site, that discovery has real value and you should weigh it. What we would push back on is paying marketplace rates on repeat customers who already know exactly who you are and would have come to your website anyway.
The questions we would ask you
Before quoting anything, we want to know how many bookings you take in a normal week and in your busiest week, what proportion are repeat customers, what your staff currently do by hand, and what the single most annoying thing about your current setup is. That last one usually tells us more than the rest combined.
If you want to go through those numbers with someone, get in touch. More detail on how we build these is on our booking system development page, and you can see one running at Laganview Golf Centre.
