Playfinder and GLL partner to fill spare capacity and help more people to get active

This case study shows how by sharing data with Playfinder, GLL has generated over £1 million in revenue, attracted new customers and tackled underutilisation at their sport facilities.

According to the latest Active Lives report, over 25% of adults are inactive — that is, doing less than 30 minutes of activity per week. Yet a Sport England survey showed that people found it more than twice as easy to book a takeaway online than they did to book a sport or fitness class online.

OpenActive is a not-for-profit, community-led initiative backed by Sport England to encourage digital transformation in the sport and physical activity sector. It aims to tackle inactivity by making it easier for people to find and book activities online. By developing data standards, OpenActive makes it easier to publish, access and use data about where, when and what activities take place.

Improving the digital customer experience also benefits activity providers. A recent case study from Playfinder, an online marketplace for sports facilities, and GLL, a social enterprise that runs over 250 sport and leisure facilities and libraries across the UK, demonstrates how it can help:

• Generate revenue
• Tackle underutilisation
• Attract new customers
• Secure off-peak bookings

Playfinder started working with GLL in 2015 to help fill spare capacity at a selection of venues. Initially, if a customer wanted to book a slot at a venue, they would have to submit a request without any access to availability. Now customers can now easily view all the available slots on Playfinder’s website and app, reducing the amount of effort it takes to book a slot.

Since 2015, Playfinder has helped GLL generate over £1 million in revenue from over 35,000 bookings across 21 sites. Crucially, an average of 77% of bookings made via Playfinder were at off-peak times, helping to tackle GLL’s underutilisation at these times, which is a common problem felt by operators throughout the industry.

Furthermore, this booking revenue came from over 11,637 customers, 97% of whom had not booked directly with GLL before.

Looking at 7 venues where Playfinder has been tracking historical utilisation rates, we can see that in 5 cases utilisation rates have improved from 2017 to 2019, (the first and last years where Playfinder has a full set of data). Utilisation increased by as much as 29%, with Playfinder taking on average an additional 2,532 bookings per venue.

The Open Booking API, developed as part of OpenActive, aims to standardise booking system integrations to support relationships between operators like GLL, and marketplaces like Playfinder. Standardising the process will reduce the barriers to integrations which improve the customer’s digital experience in the sport and physical activity sector. Four organisations are currently researching the impact and value of implementing the Open Booking API. This research is expected to unlock over 1.8 million bookable opportunities per month, which equates to over £3 million worth of bookings.

Jamie Foale, CEO of Playfinder, said:

“We’re delighted with the impact we have provided GLL in generating over £1 million of bookings and introducing over 10,000 of new customers to their partner venues, with more than three quarters of bookings being at off peak times. Playfinder’s goal is to make it easier to book local sports facilities and help venue operators fill spare capacity, and we feel that we have achieved that with GLL despite the technological challenges. If this were to become an OpenActive integration, it would make it easier to scale to new venues in new locations, helping us achieve our goal across a broader spectrum and enabling our partners to succeed in their own service delivery.”

Steve Ward, Associate Director at GLL, said:

“We’ve been happy to see Playfinder contribute to the overall booking volumes generated at GLL sports facilities and the increase in utilisation. We also recognise the value of off-peak bookings and the percentage of new customers brought to these venues. While this isn’t an OpenActive integration, it helps highlight the value in making this technology scalable and robust, which in turn provides greater accessibility to local communities and value to our partners at local authorities.”

If you’re interested in understanding more about how OpenActive can support you on your digital transformation journey, visit www.openactive.io or email hello@openactive.io