Facility Hire for Clubs: What a Free Calendar Cannot Do

On 10 August 2026, ClubZap published a post telling clubs how to manage pitch and facility scheduling for free. The advice was to build a Google Calendar and surface it to members through the club app and website. Their wording:

That is honest advice, and for a good number of clubs it is correct advice. If the only problem you have is that nobody knows when the astro is booked out, a shared calendar solves it, costs nothing, and takes an afternoon.

What makes the post worth reading is the paragraph that follows, where ClubZap draws the line themselves:

Then they list what online booking means and a calendar does not do: search available slots, book a pitch yourself, pay for facility hire online, manage cancellations. And they name where to go for it. In their words, "ClubZap partners with SportsKey for clubs that require dedicated online pitch and facility bookings".

So: a club platform, telling clubs in writing that facility booking is somebody else's product. That is a fair thing to publish and it is more useful than pretending otherwise. It also draws a very clear map of where the gap is.

The gap is the money, not the calendar

Scheduling is an information problem. Booking is a revenue problem. They look similar on a screen and they are not remotely the same thing.

A shared calendar tells your members the hall is busy on Thursday. It does not:

• Show someone the slots that are still free, at eleven o'clock at night, without asking a volunteer
• Stop two people claiming the same Thursday because both emailed the secretary
• Take the money at the point the slot is claimed
• Hold the slot while someone is getting their card out, then release it when they wander off
• Charge a different rate by duration, or a members' rate against an outside rate
• Enforce a cancellation window instead of relitigating every refund by text message

Every one of those is a volunteer's evening, or it is income the club never collected. A calendar entry that says "BOOKED - Dave" is not a booking. Nobody has paid, nothing is enforceable, and the club treasurer finds out in March.

What this looks like by club type

The gap costs different clubs different money, so it is worth being specific rather than talking about "facilities" in the abstract.

Single-pitch and single-court clubs

A football club with one astro, a tennis club with four courts, a cricket club with a square and nets. The asset is idle most of the week and in demand for about six hours of it.

The lost revenue here is almost entirely off-peak. Nobody rings the club secretary to ask about a Tuesday at two in the afternoon, because ringing is a bigger effort than the thing is worth. Put the same slot on a page where it can be seen and paid for and some of it sells. The peak hours were always going to fill; those are not the ones a booking system earns you.

The other saving is the double booking. One clash a season, with a team that has travelled, costs more in goodwill than the software costs in a year.

Sports and social clubs

Clubs with a bar, a function room, a snooker room, a committee room. These are the clubs with the most to gain and the worst admin, because the hires are the most varied: a christening, a wake, a local darts league, a slimming group on a Wednesday, someone's fortieth.

The recurring problems are always the same three. Deposits that were agreed verbally and never taken. A regular hirer who has been on the same rate since 2019 because nobody wanted the conversation. And a booking diary that lives on the bar in a notebook, which means the only person who can answer a booking enquiry is whoever is behind the bar.

Fixed pricing per duration, taken up front, removes all three at once. The rate is the rate because the system says so, and the answer to "is the room free on the 14th" stops depending on who is working.

Associations, leagues and governing bodies

Different shape of problem. An association is usually allocating access to grounds it does not own, or running a block of fixtures across venues belonging to member clubs.

What matters here is not really the payment. It is that the allocation is visible, that a club cannot quietly overwrite a fixture, and that there is a record of who booked what and when the dispute arrives in April. A booking reference and an audit trail are worth more to an association than a card payment is.

Blockouts do the heavy lifting: reserve the dates the association needs across every facility at once, then let member clubs book around the space that is left.

Multi-facility and community clubs

Clubs running a genuine mix: pitches, a hall, meeting rooms, sometimes a 3G surface shared with a school or a council. Often with grant conditions attached that require evidence of community use.

Two things matter. Changeover time between bookings, so a hall let does not collide with the group arriving to set up. And a report at the end of the year that shows who used what, which is the thing a funder asks for and the thing a notebook cannot produce.

How facility hire works on ClubPal

It is a built-in feature rather than a partner product, and it is on the same fee as everything else: 20p + 3.5% per transaction, with no subscription.

The mechanics, briefly:

• A fifteen-minute hold at checkout. Picking a slot creates a pending booking that holds it while payment is completed, and releases it automatically if payment never arrives. That is the piece that actually prevents double bookings, rather than hoping two people do not click at once.
• Availability schedules per facility. Opening and closing times day by day, with more than one window a day where you need it, so a hall can be bookable in the morning and again in the evening but not during the afternoon it is used for training.
• Pricing tiers by duration. A 60, 90 and 120 minute rate on the same facility, each priced separately, with per-package overrides so a membership tier can carry a different rate. Discount codes apply to facility bookings too.
• Buffers between bookings. An optional changeover period after each booking that is not sold to the member and not visible as bookable time. This is the one clubs forget until the first time two hirers meet in the doorway.
• Blockouts. Take one facility or all of them out of service for maintenance, club training, a tournament weekend or bank holidays.
• Cancellation windows and refund policy per facility. Members can cancel inside the window you set and not outside it. Admins can always cancel. The policy is a setting rather than an argument.
• Booking references, confirmation emails and a 24-hour reminder. Every confirmed booking gets a reference code that appears for the member and in the admin list.

Refunds are worth one extra line, because it is where most platforms quietly keep your money. Refund a facility booking on ClubPal and the whole ClubPal fee comes back with it, in proportion to the amount refunded. A washed-out pitch you refund in full costs the club nothing.

What it does not do

Two honest limits, because a page that only lists strengths is not worth much.

Bookings are made by people signed in to your club site. Facility hire is a member booking flow: whoever is hiring needs an account on your site and needs to be signed in. If your model depends on a total stranger booking a five-a-side slot without ever creating an account, that is not what this does today.

There are no lotteries or fundraising draws. ClubZap has those built in and we do not have an equivalent. If club draws are a meaningful part of your income, weigh that properly rather than taking our word on the rest.

Where this leaves you

If you are on ClubZap and facility scheduling is all you need, their advice stands and a Google Calendar will do it for nothing. Take the free option.

If you want the slots searchable, the money collected at the point of booking, and the cancellation policy enforced by something other than a committee member's patience, that is a second product on ClubZap and a built-in feature here.

Read the full ClubZap comparison, including the cost row where ClubZap comes out cheaper than we do, or look at how facility hire is put together.

Setting up a ClubPal site is free and there is no quote to wait for. Configure one pitch, set a rate, and take a real booking before you decide anything.