Setting up block booking rights

Club officials can block book courts for any time and for any reason in the Reservations tab of Manage courts.

But booking rights may also be granted to other individuals for specific purposes and can be limited in terms of which courts and when.

Such booking rights can only be set up by a club official and are defined in the Events tab of Manage clubs.

Granting booking rights to other members is always done in the context of a specific series of events, as set up in Manage series. So the first thing to identify in the Events tab of Manage clubs is to which series the booking rights will apply. Here there is a panel called "Restrict block booking to the following members". You can enter as many people as you like to be authorised to block book courts for events belonging to the series.

Remember that any organiser of a particular event has the ability to block book courts in Manage events and so they do not have to be listed here. So this list is only necessary for non-organisers. Another key difference is that when an organiser block books courts for an event they are never charged. Only people nominated here will be charged for the courts they book (and if you add an organiser in the list then this will actually cause the organiser to be subject to the charge).

Block bookers are charged for courts they book one day in advance of the booking time. This is a different pattern of charging to the usual pay-when-you-play policy of standard individual court bookings. Once a court has been charged for there is no in-built refund policy.

Within the same page you can also restrict the courts and times that are available to block bookers together with a specific fee that would apply just in this case. This is done in the "Restrict booking to the following court sets" panel. Here you nominate one or more "Court sets" that cover the courts and times that are to be made available to block bookers. If none are specified then block bookers will be able to book any courts and any times and so it is advisable to limit their scope in this way.

As mentioned, you can only select "court sets" here and so it may well be necessary to define the precise times and courts allowed as a new court set. You can set up court sets in the Court sets tab in Manage courts.

The court sets define the times and courts available to a block booker (within a week's schedule). They do not define the dates. The dates are defined by the period of any event that exists on the series. For example, if a junior coaching programme for the winter term runs from January to March and a block booking capability has been set up on the series for Sunday mornings then a block booker will only be able to book courts during this period on Sunday mornings.

You can set more than one court set. Typically this may be because you want to price the courts differently depending on the times booked. If multiple court sets are set up and some overlap each other then the system will always charge the lowest fee defined.

Court bookers (and event organisers) are given the opportunity to block book in My bookings. Here they can choose which event they want to book under and they will be presented with possible dates and times as appropriate. Note that block booking is only made available for those events that are either in Open or In play stages.