Automated or one-click block bookings

There are some circumstances where you want to make it really easy for a block booking to be put into effect for a particular event. For example, a weekly club night might always use the same courts on Thursday nights from 6:00pm to 8pm. Or perhaps you want to permit team captains to be able to book only specific courts at specific times for their team matches. By linking a court set to an event you will facilitate these kinds of scenarios either to enable automatic booking or, in the case for team captains, to block book their matches with one click.

Before doing so, of course, you'll need to know what the event is and what the court times are. Events are set up by the Events manager and that person would typically come to you, the Bookings manager, to provision their event for court usage. Together you will agree on the courts to be used. You will then need to set up a court set to reflect this as described in this article.

Armed with an event and a court set all you have to do is link them up. Here's how: Go to the Conditions tab in Hosted events and select the event in the drop down box. Then, under the Court access sub-tab, in the panel entitled "Court sets for auto-booking", choose the court set you want. Don't forget to click the blue Submit button at the bottom of the form to save this set up.

To explain a little further you might ask why this could not have been done when the Events manager set up the series. It's important to understand that a series (the overall, timeless description of an event) is set up on an affiliate. An affiliate could represents something to which many clubs could belong like a county or other cross-club entity. And as such each club would make their own choices as to when and which courts they would like to make available to this event. So generally speaking, court utilisation for events is a separate operation that is club specific - and which is controlled by the club's Bookings manager.

Finally, you may notice that you can set up more than one court set here. This can help you in the case where you think it is possible that some of the courts may already have been booked out. It allows you to provide alternative choices. For example, if you just wanted one court for three consecutive sessions, you may not care which court. What you could do (if you have 4 courts) is specify 4 court sets where each selects just one of the courts. If you then nominate all 4 of them here, ManageMyMatch will try and book the first one and, if those courts are already taken, it'll try the next one and so on.

While the automatic bookings are made beyond the member booking horizon, it can still be the case that the courts are booked by the club for some other purpose (say a team match). Auto booking will never cancel an existing booking no matter what it's purpose or origination.