Booking systems
A venue booking system for bays, sessions, private hire and tours, on your own site with no cut of each booking.
Take your own bookingsCommission on every booking is a cost that grows exactly as fast as you do.
A venue taking 200 bookings a week at £25 through a platform charging 5% is handing over roughly £13,000 a year, before the monthly licence. A bespoke system is a one-off build cost and a hosting bill, built around what you actually sell: bays, timed slots, capacity per session, private hire or tours.
Real-time slots across bays, lanes, tables or rooms.
Deposits or payment in full, taken through Stripe.
Peak pricing, minimum durations, buffers and cut-offs.
Automatic emails, reminders and calendar invites.
A back office your team can use on a busy Saturday.
Occupancy, revenue and no-shows you can act on.
Who it is for
Tick anything that sounds familiar.
Venue booking systems, built and live
Laganview Golf Centre's bay booking system first, then Tour Guides NI and Haymarket Belfast. See all of our work.
Both Kyle and Luke took the time to listen to our requirements and provided valuable insights throughout the development process. The end result exceeded our expectations, providing a seamless and efficient booking experience for our customers while streamlining our operations. This is demonstrated through the increase of bookings we've received since launching our new website.
How we deliver
A fixed price agreed first, and the same people the whole way through.
We start with how bookings happen today, including the parts that live in someone's head. Every venue has exceptions, and the exceptions are what off-the-shelf software gets wrong.
Opening hours, session lengths, turnaround time between bookings, peak pricing, deposits, cancellations. We write these down and agree them with you before anything gets built.
The customer side has to be quick on a phone, because that is where most bookings come from. We design and prototype it before development so you can click through it and tell us what is wrong.
Built in Laravel, with payments through Stripe or the provider you already use. We build the staff back office alongside the customer side rather than bolting it on afterwards, because your team will use it far more often than any customer does.
We test double bookings, dropped payments, refunds and the awkward cases that only show up when the place is full. Better to find them on staging than on a Saturday night.
We train your staff, watch the first busy weekend closely, and stay on to add things as the business changes. See our maintenance packages.
The wider category. Member portals, internal tools and platforms built around your business.
The framework we build booking systems in, and what that means for cost and upkeep.
Range bays, timed slots, capacity per session, private hire and tours, from the team behind Laganview's bay booking system. A venue system typically takes about 4 to 8 weeks to build.
You get the approach, what is in, what is out, a timeline and a price before anything starts. No hourly rate quietly running in the background.
How much of it is bespoke, how many systems it has to talk to, and how much content needs moving across. We will tell you which of those is driving the cost.
A monthly plan covering updates, backups and small changes, priced separately so you can see exactly what the ongoing commitment is.
Why build a booking system instead of using an off-the-shelf one?
For a lot of businesses an off-the-shelf tool is the right answer and we will tell you so. It stops fitting when the booking rules are specific to how you operate: bays or courts rather than tables, memberships that change the price, block bookings, seasonal rates, or a deposit that behaves differently at weekends. At that point the workarounds cost more than the licence.
Can it take payments and deposits?
Yes. Full payment, a deposit with the balance on arrival, or membership credit are all normal. Payments run through a provider such as Stripe, and refunds and cancellations follow whatever rules you set rather than a generic policy.
What stops two people booking the same slot?
The database does, not the interface. Availability is checked and the slot is locked at the moment of payment, inside a single transaction, so two people pressing confirm at the same instant cannot both succeed. This is the part that off-the-shelf tools usually get right and cheap custom builds usually get wrong.
Can it work with the website we already have?
Yes. We can add booking to an existing site, or run it as its own application that matches your branding. If your current site is due for replacement anyway we will say that rather than build twice.
Can staff manage bookings without using the public site?
Yes. There is an admin side for taking phone bookings, blocking out maintenance, adjusting a booking someone got wrong, and seeing the day at a glance. In practice this is the screen your team spends the most time in, so we design it around how they actually work.
How long does a venue booking system take to build?
A venue booking system typically takes about 4 to 8 weeks to build, once the scope and the fixed quote are agreed. Every project gets its own fixed quote, based on a written scope and agreed before work starts.
Has a venue in Northern Ireland built its own booking system?
Yes. Laganview Golf Centre in Lisburn runs a bespoke bay booking system built by Element Seven for its 50 floodlit bays, 12 social bays and VIP suite, with Dojo card payments, gift cards and automatic PDF confirmations. Since December 2023 it has taken more than 11,100 confirmed and paid bay bookings, and over 3,800 customers have created accounts. We also built Tour Guides NI, where every guide's profile carries a booking enquiry form: a visitor picks a date and describes the tour they want, and the request goes to that guide and to head office. At Haymarket Belfast, six venues each have their own booking route: tables book through ResDiary and activities through Roller, from each venue's own pages, and private rooms, group events and corporate days have their own enquiry routes.