Skedda Alternative for Racquet Clubs: One Block, Thirty-Two Players
Your open play night is one block on the calendar and thirty-two people in the building. That gap is where a space-booking engine stops helping. Here is what AllBooked by Skedda costs in 2026, where it genuinely fits a racquet club, and the narrow case for moving.
It is 6:50 on a Tuesday and thirty-two people are lacing up for drop-in. You have six courts. Your booking calendar shows exactly one entry for the whole evening: Courts 1 through 6, blocked, 6pm to 10pm, Open Play.
That entry is the software doing its job correctly. It is also the moment the software stops helping you. Everything that decides whether tonight goes well happens after that block gets created: who is next on, who has sat out two rotations, who paid, who is a guest, who walked in and told nobody.
Skedda, and its sports-facing product AllBooked, is very good at the block. It is a space-booking engine, and space-booking engines are built for rooms that one group occupies at a time. A badminton court on open play night is not that room. Here is where that difference costs you, and where it honestly does not.
What AllBooked by Skedda gets right
Credit first. Skedda has been doing this a long time and it shows in the parts that are genuinely hard: a clean booking calendar, interactive facility maps, booking windows and quotas, Stripe payments, batch invoicing, and a rules engine that can express complicated availability without anyone touching code. If your facility rents courts to people who reserve a slot and show up, it will serve you well.
Multi-use venues do especially well here. If you rent courts on Tuesday, a dance floor on Wednesday, and the whole hall for a birthday party on Saturday, a general space engine is the right shape, because "space" really is the unit you are selling.
Where a space engine stops short at a racquet club
Open play is a queue, not a booking
The block on the calendar tells you nothing about the next four hours. Who is up, which four go on Court 3, how long they stay, what happens when the winners want to hold the court, how somebody who sat out twice gets priority. Most clubs run this on a whiteboard or a free rotation app on somebody's phone. It works fine right up until the person holding the phone has to go deal with the front desk.
We built the queue into the platform instead. Players join a live queue, courts rotate fairly, results get confirmed or disputed by the players themselves, and standings update from confirmed matches. Player ratings sync off those same confirmed results, so the ladder is not a separate spreadsheet somebody rebuilds on Sunday nights.
A regular is a member, not a repeating reservation
Space engines model your best customer as a recurring booking. Clubs model that person as a membership with a life to it: joins, pays, changes tier, brings family, drifts, comes back. AllBooked puts membership subscriptions on its Advanced plan at $199 a month. What arrives there is subscription billing attached to booking allowances, which is a different thing from a member record your front desk can actually work from.
Prepaid packages have to come off at the door
Ten-play cards are how a lot of court businesses get paid in advance. That money is only real if the credit deducts at check-in automatically, without a staff member remembering to mark it. Ours deducts on check-in, and QR self check-in writes an attendance history you can pull later when you are trying to work out which hours actually earn their keep.
What AllBooked costs in 2026
From their own published plans, billed annually: Core is $99 a month and caps at three spaces. Business is $149 and caps at twenty-five, with spaces sixteen through twenty-five billed at $4.99 each. Advanced is $199, carries unlimited spaces, and is the first plan that includes memberships and interactive maps. Visitor management is a $99 a month add-on on every tier.
So for a fourteen-court facility that wants memberships, the line you are really pricing is Advanced. Run your own count before you sign, and confirm it with the vendor directly, because plans move.
Facility Presence and AllBooked, side by side
| What a court night needs | Facility Presence | AllBooked by Skedda |
|---|---|---|
| Court rental with double-booking prevention | Yes | Yes |
| Live open play queue with fair court rotation | Yes | Not in the published feature set |
| Score confirm and dispute by players | Yes | Not in the published feature set |
| Standings and ratings from confirmed matches | Yes | Not in the published feature set |
| Membership lifecycle | All accounts | Advanced plan, $199/mo |
| Packages and credits deducted at check-in | Yes | Varies, check your plan |
| QR self check-in with attendance history | Yes | Varies, check your plan |
| Per-transaction booking fees | None | Check your plan |
| Contract | Month-to-month | Plans priced billed annually |
| Data migration | Free, white-glove | Varies |
Vendors change plans and features often. Confirm the current details with each provider before you decide.
When you should stay where you are
If you rent courts by the slot, your members are really just repeat renters, you do not run drop-in, and your building hosts several different kinds of activity, AllBooked is the better tool for you. Switching would be a downgrade wearing an upgrade's clothes. We would rather say that now than six weeks into a migration.
The case for moving is narrower and more specific than most vendor pages will admit. It holds when drop-in is a real slice of your revenue, when you sell packages or memberships, and when you are tired of running the actual night on a whiteboard standing next to software you already pay for.
Questions we get asked
Can we keep our history if we move?
Yes. We do the migration ourselves and we do not charge for it: members, prepaid package balances, and the bookings already sitting on next month's calendar. You approve the mapping before anything goes live.
Do you charge per booking?
No. There are no per-transaction fees on our side. Stripe's card rates pass straight through to you, and refunds, PDF invoices, and account credits are part of the platform rather than a paid tier.
We run badminton and pickleball on the same floor. Does that work?
Yes. Courts are configured per sport, double-booking prevention runs across the whole floor, and open play sessions are set up per sport with their own queue and rotation.
The useful test is one question, and you can answer it tonight: on your busiest drop-in evening, how much of what happens lives in your software and how much lives in somebody's head? If it is mostly somebody's head, that is the gap worth closing, and no amount of booking-calendar polish will close it. Bring your actual Tuesday schedule to a 30-minute demo and we will walk through it live, court by court.