Member Splash features an integrated reservations system that makes it easy to control access to lap lanes, tennis courts, picnic pavilions and more. The reservations system supports a variety of booking rules to control how far in advance reservations can be made; which members are allowed to reserve various facilities; how many reservations a particular member or account can make in a given time period; and much more.

NOTE: If your club is not using the reservations tool you can hide the Reservations tab from your members to avoid confusion. Go to Member Splash Settings -> Account Settings and look for the Manage Account Screen Tabs section. Here you can control which account tabs your members see.

Facilities refer to anything that a member can make a reservation for: a lap lane, the main swim pool, a tennis court, etc. Facility Groups are used to organize individual facilities. If you have 4 lap lanes that members can reserve you would create a Facility Group called Lap Lanes and then four facilities in that group, one for each lane. You can set schedules and reservation rules at the group level to be applied to all facilities in the group, and you can override those default schedules and rules on a per-facility basis.

To add a facility group navigate to Reservations -> Facilities in the Member Splash admin dashboard and click on the Add Facility Group button. This will open up a popup form to configure the various group settings. Here we break the form down into a few sections.

The Group Name is what will be shown to members and administrators. You can choose anything you like, but we recommend using something that clearly connotes what the group is for.

Next you can choose if the group should be visible to members on the front end. This is helpful when you're setting up a group but aren't ready for members to make reservations yet.

The Guests settings are used to control whether or not members are presented fields to add one or more guests to their reservation. NOTE: This is not tied to guest passes, meaning that adding two guests to a tennis court reservation won't automatically deduct two guest credits from the member's account. Clubs have a wide range of guest pass and facility use policies. If you require the use of guest credits for a facility your front desk will want to deduct them as per any other guest visit.

The Restrict Access byA Account Type(s) setting allows you to select one more account types which will be allowed to make reservations at facilities in the group. A common use case is clubs that offer both swim and swim & tennis memberships would restrict access to their tennis courts to members who purchased the swim & tennis option. Members with account types that aren't listed will not see the facility group.

Allow Unpaid Members to Reserve refers to individual members, not an account. When a member attempts to make a reservation any members of the account who are not marked as paid are by default disabled and can't be added to the reservation. This setting overrides that behavior.

The Group Rules section allows you to set group level reservation rules that will apply to all facilities in the group. These rules are all optional -- if you leave them blank then members will be able to make as many reservations as they like, as far in advance as they like.

The Restrict Advance Booking settings allow you to set how far in advance reservations can be made for facilities in this group. The limits are relative to the end of the current day. Example: If you restricted booking to 1 day in advance like so:
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A member who went to book a reservation on a Saturday would be able to pick any open slot remaining on Saturday; any available slot on Sunday; but nothing on Monday and beyond.

Below that you can control the number of reservations that can be made per day and per week. Each rule can be applied to either individual members OR to an entire account, and you can combine the two rule types. A typical example would be a club that requires reservations for lap lanes. The rules might limit individual members to one reservation per day, and might further limit any individual account to no more than 10 total reservations per week.

The final section of the Facility Group form is used to create an optional default availability schedule. If one exists it will automatically apply to all facilities in the group unless an individual facility has its own schedule defined, in which case that will take precedence. The group level schedule is handy for things like lap lanes or tennis courts where you might have a number of facilities that are all available to reserve on the same days and times.

Clicking on Add a Schedule will open a second window that allows you to set the start and end dates for the schedule and define the days and times that the facilities are available to be booked.

The Start Date and End Date are required and control when this particular schedule is in effect. That allows you to create multiple schedules for different times of the year. For example, your tennis courts may be open until 10pm in the summer but only 7pm in the winter.

Clicking anywhere in the schedule will create a 15-minute blue reservation block:

To extend that block you can either hover over it, click when the cursor changes to up and down arrows, and then drag to extend it, or you can right click on it, choose Edit and enter start and end times manually.

To remove a time slot just right click on it and hit Delete.

Single Time Slots: The easiest way is to create a single time slot for each day that the facility can be reserved entering the start and end times. For example, if your lap lanes are available from 7am to 10pm you would create a single block with those start and end times. Later, when you define the individual lap lanes you will set the maximum reservation length, say 1 hour. On the front end the reservation calendar is divided into 15-minute blocks and a member would be able to start on any one of them and book for up to an hour.

Multiple Time Slots: If you have various blocks of time that a facility isn't available to be booked or you want to avoid unused blocks of time between reservations you can opt to define individual slots. Example:

This avoids a member booking from say 7:00 - 7:45am and another member booking starting at 8am, thus leaving a 15-minute gap. It can also make it easier for guards to enforce reservation lengths as they know that each lane should turn over on the hour.

Whichever method you choose, it is easy to duplicate schedules across multiple days. Just hover over the day name at the top of the schedule and choose Copy to copy the full schedule for that day or Paste to duplicate a copied schedule onto the selected day.

Once you are done configuring the schedule click Add at the top right to save it. Schedules can be edited, deleted or cloned (duplicated) at any time.

On the Facilities screen if you have a facility group selected in the drop down menu at the top you will see buttons for editing or deleting that group.

Choosing Edit Group will open up the same editor as creating a new one but with all of the group's information pre-filled.

Choosing Delete Group will either warn you that the group still has facilities attached to it that must be deleted or re-assigned first, or will ask you to confirm before permanently deleting the group.

Once you have at least one facility group configured you're ready to start adding individual reservable facilities. From the Reservations -> Facilities screen (same one as discussed above) click on the Add Facility button. That will open the following form in a popup window:

The Facility Group will default to either whichever group you had selected, or if none was selected, then the first group in the list.

As with the facility group, the Facility Name can be anything you like but typically is something like Lane 1 or Pickleball Court 2.

The Visible to Members setting is enabled by default. You can toggle that off to remove a facility from front end view at any time without affecting any existing reservations.

Enabling a Custom Email Message allows you to add a specific message to the reservation confirmation email the member receives after making their reservation. This is often used for things like providing a tennis court gate code.

The Maximum Capacity setting refers to the capacity for the entire facility. For a lap lane this might be 1 if you wish to limit it to a single lap swimmer at a time. For a tennis court it might be 4 to allow for doubles play. If you set the capacity for a lap lane to 2, that would allow two different people to book the same lane at the same time and split lanes.

Maximum Reservation Length controls how long a single reservation can be but doesn't control the minimum length. If you set the maximum length to 1 hour a member could still make a 30 minute reservation, unless the Timeslots Enabled setting is enabled (covered a bit further down).

Enabling the Single Account Per Time Slot setting means that only members (and guests if allowed) from the same account can book at one time. Suppose you have tennis courts that allow up to 4 players for doubles. Checking this option would mean that if a member reserves the court to play singles nobody else would be able to book the court at the same time even though the maximum capacity (4) wouldn't be reached.

Timeslots Enabled is useful in conjunction with schedules where you define an opening and closing time instead of individual reservable blocks. A few screenshots will help explain how.

Suppose you have lap lanes set up with one long reservable slot each day from 6am to 7pm like so:

By default our reservation tool uses 15-minute increments so what a member would see is a list of 15-minute blocks on the calendar.

Clicking on one of those spots would allow them to create a reservation for up to the maximum reservation length.

If the member opted to make a 45-minute reservation it would block out that time and the next available slot would be 6:45am. That opens the possibility of another member making a reservation at say 7:15am, leaving a half hour gap in the schedule that might be shorter than anyone wants to book.

With the timeslots enabled setting each reservation is automatically set to the maximum allowed length. So if we set the max length to 30 minutes, the same booking calendar would now look like this.

Without having to define each reservable block you are now forcing members to book on the half hour. If you wanted to allow for a full hour of lap swimming you would simply set the maximum reservations per person per day to 2, allowing members to book two consecutive blocks.

Whether or not to Allow Guests can be optionally set at the facility group level. If enabled at the group level then that will take precedence. If disabled at the group level then enabling at the facility level will take precedence.

The Schedules section works exactly like it does for Facility Groups, covered above. In this case the Facility Group schedule (if defined) will be used if there is no schedule defined at the Facility level for the same day(s). Otherwise the Facility schedule will take precedence. An example of how this works will clarify.

Suppose you set a schedule at the Facility Group level that applies from Memorial Day to Labor day and states that lap lanes are reservable from 7am to 10pm daily. That will apply to all lap lanes in the group. However you could then add a schedule to Lane 1 for June 1 - June 30 that limits the hours to 7am to noon. Those would override the group schedule.

There are two sides to reservations:

If your club has not turned off the reservations tab (covered at the start of this article) your members will see that tab and two submenu items when logged into their account.

Clicking on My Reservations will show them a list of all of their reservations. For future reservations they have the option to edit or cancel them.

Clicking on Make Reservation will load a reservation calendar. At the top of the screen is a drop down menu to select which Facility Group they want to view (if you have more than one). The main section of the calendar shows all of the facilities in that group.

Spots that are greyed out are unavailable. In the screenshot above it is because it is already past that date / time. They would appear the same way if the slot was in the future but all spaces were already claimed.

Clicking on an available space opens up a popup window where the member can select the end time (if the Timeslots Enabled option is disabled. If it is enabled then the start and end times will be pre-set and not adjustable). They can also select the members to be included on the reservation, add guests (if allowed), and select one or more email addresses to receive the confirmation email and reminder notification.

Upon successful submission of the reservation request a confirmation window will show the reservation details as well as an option to add the reservation to one of several different calendar services.

Administrators can view, filter and search all past and future reservations from the Reservations -> Reservations screen on the admin dashboard. By default it shows reservations through the end of the current week, using a Sunday start date. Ex: If you load that screen on Friday you'll see reservations for Friday and Saturday. You can select specific dates to view or choose one of the pre-defined date ranges such as This Weekend, which will automatically select the closest Friday - Sunday. If you select that on a Saturday, for example, it would be the current weekend. Select it on a Tuesday and it would be the upcoming weekend.

Once you have selected a date range and optionally select a specific Facility Group to filter by, hit Apply to see any matching reservations. Clicking on the burger menu at the right of each row will give you options to edit or delete the reservation.

You can also export reservations to CSV or Excel format. Simply select one or more reservations using the checkboxes on the left hand side of the table and the click on the Export button. NOTE: The Export button will be disabled (grayed out) unless you have at least one reservation selected.

Administrators also have the ability to create reservations on behalf of their members. The Reservations -> Calendar screen on the admin dashboard works almost identically to the reservation calendar members see on the front end, with the difference being that you'll need to look up the account you are making the reservation for.

Click on any reservable block on the calendar to open a search tool for selecting the account. You can search by account number, last name or street address. Simply start typing and the results will be filtered for matches.

Once you have found the correct account, click on the Add Reservation button to the right and complete the same reservation process a member would. The only difference is that the reservation confirmation notice doesn't offer the option to add it to a calendar.

The final component of the reservations system is the Programs & Events screen. This allows you to create events that are added to your reservations calendar, automatically blocking the relevant days, times and facilities from being reserved by members and displaying event information on the front end. This is great for things like tennis lessons that might take up a couple of courts for a few hours each week.

Clicking on the Add Event button will open the event form:

First you need to select a Facility Group where the event is taking place. Then enter a title for the event, an optional description (it will be displayed to members on the front end), select which facility(ies) it will use, and pick the days of the week, times and date range.

If you toggle the Add to events calendar switch it will also create a calendar event in the main club events calendar in addition to the entry in the reservations calendar.

On the front end the member will see the event displayed like so:

When a member places a reservation they have the option to have a confirmation email and reminders sent to one or more email addresses associated with their account.

The confirmation email contains all of the reservation details as well as a link to cancel it.

In addition to the initial confirmation email, each day at 3pm the system checks for any reservations scheduled for the following day and sends a reminder notification.