Bowling Alley/Sports Centre online booking software

February 22, 2007 4:17 AM

PinPalsFilter: Looking for a commercial software package that will allow online reservation of bowling lanes in a bowling alley.

The package needs to have a web front end that so people can book lanes online, and see availability, time slots etc. This would obviously need to connect to some kind of back end where administrators could view, edit, administer the bookings, run reports/backups etc.

Commercial because I need to have tech support if anything goes wrong.

What would be awesome would be a package that could be expanded to manage not just bowling lanes, but other aspects of a leisure center, ie. squash courts, indoor soccer pitches... that kind of stuff.

OS/platform not important, as long as it gets the job done effectively. Cost mustn't be extortionate, but I do have a decent enough budget.

Anyone know of anything like this? Google is being vague.

Thanks a million, guys.

posted by ReiToei to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Libraries use software like this to "book" computers (even entire rooms) for users for a set period of time. It's sometimes called "media scheduling" or "resource management" software. You could probably adapt one of those packages to suit your needs. Unfortunately, I can't remember offhand the names of some of these packages. Here's a list of open source resource management software the might help you get started. Here's a link for a software package called "Webcheckout" that might work for you. I'll post again if I can remember what software we used in the public library where I used to work.
posted by arco at 7:21 AM on February 22, 2007

I have had the extreme misfortune of maintaining a (heavily customized) installation of Online Resource Scheduler here at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Functional Neuroimaging (our install) for the last four years.

With four years of experience dealing with it under my belt, let me be the first to warn you off. (You probably wouldn't have considered it as it's noncommercial, but still.) It's extremely featureful, but incredibly unstable and prone to database corruption at the slightest hint that you're looking at it the wrong way (this is because it stores all its data in hundreds of CSV files that are read from and written out afresh in every transaction, non-atomically).

Happy hunting. I was on the same quest five years ago, and I wish I'd ended up using something else, but I'm stuck with supporting it now.

It is really incredibly featureful. It's amazing stuff. It'd be miraculously good, if only it weren't so bad.
posted by dmd at 10:40 AM on February 22, 2007