Facility Booking Process Planning Checklist

List every way a booking request could reach you at present, including a phone, a message, a shared inbox, somebody stopping you in person and a note through a door.

Requests arrive by whatever is easiest for the person asking, and a route nobody is watching is where double bookings begin.

Decide the single place a request has to end up in whatever way it arrived, and name who is responsible for putting it there.

The problem is rarely how many routes lead in, it is that nothing forces them to converge before somebody promises a slot.

Write down who is allowed to accept a booking, and make sure anybody else who gets asked knows to pass it on rather than agree to it.

Most double bookings are made by a helpful person who did not realise they were not the one who answers.

Consider what a person will assume if they hear nothing back after asking, and decide what you would rather they did instead.

Silence is read as a refusal by some people and as agreement by others, and both readings cause trouble on the day.

Decide what happens to requests that arrive when nobody is looking, and whether the person asking is told that in the same place they asked.

Requests mostly arrive in the evening, which is precisely when nobody responsible is reading anything.

Keep the original wording of what somebody asked for rather than only your summary of it, since later disagreements turn on exactly what was requested.

A summary written by the person accepting a booking always leans towards their own reading of it, without anybody intending that.

Require that every booking names one person responsible on the day, with a contact number, rather than standing in the name of a team, a club or a school class.

A booking held by a group is a booking with nobody to ring when the gate is shut or the session has overrun.

Ask what the facility is actually going to be used for, in the requester's own words, rather than assuming it matches the activity you had in mind.

Sites get used for things nobody anticipated, and the request is the only moment you find out before it happens.

Ask roughly how many people are expected, including anybody watching rather than taking part, and record the answer exactly as it was given.

Spectators are almost never mentioned in a request and frequently outnumber the people taking part.

How many people a facility can accommodate at one time is confirmed with the relevant local authority and a suitably qualified professional, not set by the operator.

Ask what equipment the group intends to bring in or set up, and whether anything would be fixed to a surface, a wall, a post or a fence.

Whether anything may be attached to a structure or a surface is a question for the installing contractor or a suitably qualified professional before it is agreed to.

Ask whether the session involves children or adults who may need additional support, and note that the arrangements for this sit outside the booking itself.

Arrangements for supervising children or vulnerable adults are set with qualified professionals and the relevant authority, and are never settled through a booking conversation.

Ask whether anybody in the group has access requirements you should know about, and record what they tell you rather than deciding what they would need.

What a facility can offer a user with particular access requirements is established with a suitably qualified professional rather than judged by the operator.

Block out the time already committed to cleaning, upkeep and repairs, and put it in the same calendar as the bookings rather than in somebody's head.

Upkeep loses to a booking every time when only one of the two is actually written down.

Write in the sessions the owner, the club or the school already uses, including the ones so regular that nobody thinks of them as bookings at all.

The standing arrangement everybody knows about is the first one booked over, precisely because it was never recorded.

Record which parts of the season the facility is not available at all, and write down why, so the reason outlives the person who decided it.

Closures made for a good reason get reopened by somebody who never knew the reason, usually a season later.

Agree in advance who decides that conditions make the facility unusable, how that decision reaches people who have booked, and where it gets recorded.

The point at which ground or weather conditions make a facility unusable is set by the installing contractor or a suitably qualified professional, not by whoever is on site.

Leave room for visits by contractors and suppliers, and ask each of them what access they need, since a service visit that cannot get in is a wasted one.

Service visits are arranged to suit the visitor's own route, and a permanently full calendar has nowhere to put them.

Note which slots nobody ever asks for, and consider whether that time is more useful held for upkeep than kept open for a request that never comes.

The pattern of what is never requested is more useful for planning upkeep than the pattern of what is.

Decide whether one booking ends exactly as the next begins or whether a gap sits between them, and record which of those you have chosen.

Back-to-back bookings assume everybody leaves promptly, which is the assumption that fails first in practice.

Agree who is responsible for clearing equipment, litter and belongings before the next group arrives, and put it in the booking rather than on a notice board.

The departing group thinks the operator does it and the arriving group thinks the previous group did, so nobody does.

Decide what an arriving group should do if the previous session is still running, and who they contact rather than sorting it out between themselves.

Two groups negotiating a handover in a parking area is where most complaints about a shared facility originate.

Consider whether changing areas, washrooms or storage are shared during a changeover, and whether two groups can use them at once without obstruction.

Changing space is the real bottleneck at a changeover rather than the activity area, and it is usually planned for one group at a time.

Decide what happens to lighting, heating and doors between sessions, and whether a departing group is expected to change anything at all.

How lighting, heating and access installations should be operated is described by the installer, and controls are not adjusted by users without that guidance.

Note whether arriving and departing groups have to use the same door or gate, and whether anything about that route makes passing difficult.

A single narrow entrance carrying traffic in both directions is the point at which a smooth changeover stops being possible.

Decide how somebody cancels, and make the route the same one they used to book so it does not depend on remembering a different contact.

Cancellations sent to whichever route the person happens to recall land somewhere nobody is watching, and the slot stays blocked.

Decide who is able to release a cancelled slot and offer it to somebody else, and where that change has to be recorded before it counts.

A released slot that exists only in a conversation is the classic route to two groups arriving at the same moment.

Agree what counts as not turning up and write it in plain words, since a group that arrives late and a group that never arrives are different situations.

Without a written rule the decision gets made in the moment by whoever is standing there, and it will not be made the same way twice.

Decide what happens when the same recurring booking is repeatedly not used, and record the pattern rather than relying on somebody remembering it.

A standing booking nobody uses is the most common way a facility appears full while standing empty.

Decide how you tell people when you have to cancel, and check that you hold a contact route for every booking that would reach somebody quickly.

Operators discover they cannot reach a group at exactly the moment they need to, usually because only one address was ever recorded.

Decide who deals with any financial arrangement attached to bookings, and keep those records separate from the booking record itself.

Any financial arrangement for use of a facility is a matter for the owner and their own financial or legal adviser rather than a preparation checklist.

Decide what a confirmation says, including where to arrive, how to get in, who to contact and what the facility does not provide.

Almost every question asked on the day is one the confirmation could have answered before anybody set off.

Be explicit about how the group gets in, including whether somebody has to be there to unlock and what happens if that person is delayed.

Getting in is the single most common failure at the start of a session, and it is entirely predictable in advance.

State plainly what is not provided, such as equipment, storage, refreshments, supervision or anybody being on site during the session.

Expectations that were never stated are the ones people arrive holding, and stating an absence takes a single sentence.

Decide what conditions of use somebody is agreeing to when they book, and make sure they see them then rather than on a notice afterwards.

The wording and effect of any conditions of use is a matter for the owner and their own legal adviser, not something drafted from a preparation list.

Decide how a change to a confirmed booking is handled and recorded, so the last agreed version is obvious to both sides afterwards.

Changes agreed verbally leave two people holding different versions of the same booking, each of them entirely confident.

Consider whether a short reminder before a session is worth sending, and what it would usefully repeat about getting in and where to park.

A reminder reduces the number of people arriving at the wrong entrance far more effectively than another notice on the gate.

Decide what your booking record has to be able to answer later, such as who used the facility on a given occasion and who agreed that booking.

Records are designed for making bookings and then asked to reconstruct one afterwards, which is a genuinely different job.

Keep one calendar rather than several, and decide who is able to change it, since a second copy is only ever consulted when the first turns out to be wrong.

Parallel calendars agree perfectly until the day they do not, which is always a day with two groups on site.

Decide what contact details you keep and where they are stored, and treat how long they may be held as a question for a qualified adviser.

What a booking record may hold about a person, and on what basis, sits under the relevant local requirements; put that question to a suitably qualified adviser.

Note against a booking anything that actually happened, such as damage found, a session that overran or a group that could not get in.

The value of a booking record comes from the exceptions written against it rather than from the bookings that went as planned.

Decide who can see the booking record and who can change it, and consider whether those really ought to be the same set of people.

Read access and change access get bundled together by accident, and that is how a booking quietly disappears from a calendar.

Agree how the booking record passes to whoever takes over, and make sure it does not depend on one person's account or one person's device.

Booking records are the first thing lost when a committee changes, and the loss is only noticed at the next disputed slot.