Covid-19, fitness centers, grow your business, Howto, recreation centers, sports facilities

How Sports and Fitness Facilities can Reopen Successfully during Covid-19 (and how Appointy can help!)

How sports and fitness facilities can reopen successfully during Covid

With lockdown and stay-at-home restrictions being lifted, businesses are being asked to reopen at an unprecedented rate. That has presented unique challenges for many industries. One such industry is the sports facility industry.

Over the past few months, COVID-19 has negatively affected the sports and fitness industry. After all, being in an environment in which people are sweating profusely and breathing heavily while being in close proximity to each other is not very conducive to curbing the spread of the highly contagious Coronavirus.

As a result, the owners/managers of sports and fitness facilities that are looking to reopening are not sure what steps they need to take to reopen while implementing federal and state guidelines.

If you are one of them, what can you do next? 

Here’s a solution: Using online scheduling to reopen sports and fitness facilities safely during Covid-19!

With online scheduling, not only are you in control of the total number of people who enter your workplace at any given time, but you can also ensure that customer services keep running smoothly while you are making the best use of your time – by sanitizing the workplace and preparing for your upcoming appointments.

Over the last few weeks, an increasing number of businesses (salons, spas, gyms, stores, etc.)  have implemented online scheduling into their workflow to create a safe work environment. 

Boys playing football in a sports facility center that uses Appointy

Just like these other businesses, we, at Appointy, have also helped many sports facilities and recreational centers to set up online appointment scheduling for their businesses recently.

In this blog, we’ve covered in detail how online scheduling with Appointy can help you reopen safely during Covid-19. You can jump to any relevant section from the links below!

Or, if you would rather see how Appointy’s software for sports facilities can help you live and in-action, leave your email address below and we’ll set up a quick demo call with you:

  1. Schedule appointments for different facilities
  2. Manage capacities for each facility
  3. Manage the resources of your sports facilities with a few clicks
  4. Keep your member and customer data – in one place
  5. Ask additional questions with the help of Intake forms
  6. Display terms and conditions and ask members to agree to waivers
  7. Accept online payments and avoid cash/card payments

Don’t worry, you’re not going to have to do all these by yourself. Appointy’s sports facility scheduling software is going to help you check each of these tasks off your to-do list.

Want to know how? Well, let’s read on.


Appointy’s sports facility scheduling software is here to assist you!


1. Schedule appointments for different facilities

Many of the sports facilities that approach us, always talk about how difficult it gets to manage all the facilities that are under their administration.

Appointy takes away the hassle of managing these facilities. 

  • Be able to set different schedules for each track/field at the click of a button 
  • If a certain field/track is out-of-service, take it out of commission so that it cannot be booked. 
  • If you have multiple locations, manage these locations and it’s facilities discreetly.

Not only that, get your own business booking portal where customers and/or members can make bookings 24×7. With Appointy, a sports facility can take appointments for its soccer field, its basketball field, and even its athletics track without having to worry about scheduling them individually. Appointy handles all the hard work.

Appointy also lets you send a wide variety of customizable automated email notifications to your customers. These email notifications can be for appointment confirmation, reminder, and can be sent even if an appointment is cancelled or rescheduled. This eliminates the tedious back and forth that happens over the phone between the front desk staff and the customer/member.

Man running on an athletics track in a sports facility center that uses Appointy

2. Manage capacities for each facility

We’ve heard it loud and clear: social distancing and maintaining a 6 feet distance is the way to stop the spread of the virus and beat it. To be frank, the only way you can implement social distancing in a sports facility is by strictly limiting the number of people using a facility at any given time.

Appointy lets its users set maximum capacity limits for each facility too. By limiting how many people can book a certain facility like a track or a court at any given time, the management team of the sports facility can ensure all social distancing and safety protocols are followed.

For example, if a running field has 6 tracks, the management team of the sports facility can limit the capacity of each running track separately. This gives greater control and flexibility to the management team of the sports facility. If the capacity of each track is set to 5 during a single appointment slot, Appointy will only allow 5 people to book each track at that time.


3. Manage the resources of your sports facilities with a few clicks

Use Appointy’s resource management feature to assign resources to specific facilities under your management. Efficient resource management helps businesses in streamlining appointment scheduling while also preventing double bookings.

People working in the fitness industry are used to seeing appointments being booked with resources that are either not available or out of service. Having to tell your client that they would have to reschedule or cancel their appointment because a certain resource they requested is not available is not an easy conversation to have. Being able to schedule your resources will allow a sports facility to make all of its services available for online appointments.

If a fitness facility has 3 spin biking studios with 10 spin cycles in each studio, Appointy will let you assign each spin cycle to a particular studio. If a particular spin cycle is not functional, this will then lower the capacity of the studio to which the cycle was linked. 

This makes taking appointments easier than ever and ensures effective management of resources in your sports facility and gives the management team peace of mind.

Boys playing basketball in the basketball court of a sports facility center

4. Keep your member and customer data – in one place

A customer and member database is a core component of a business and its identity. An online database gives management up-to-date information on customers and members. This builds loyalty and encourages repeat business. Appointy maintains an extensive database of all the customers/members of a business.

The database will contain details like 

  • Name of the customer and/or member
  • Their address, 
  • Their appointment history, 
  • Their past payments, 
  • Any notes, etc.

Customers can be added manually by staff members of the sports facility and will also be added automatically to the database when they book an appointment.

Appointy’s sports facility booking software also allows you to import your own list of customers into the software. Additionally, you can also export your customer database from Appointy. A member of the management team can search for a customer and pull up all relevant details in an instant. This allows for easy troubleshooting.


5. Ask additional questions with the help of Intake forms

One of the headlining features of Appointy is the ability to ask customers to fill forms and answer relevant questions before scheduling an appointment. 

This way the staff members of a sports facility can get answers to questions that will provide extra information that might assist them in preparing for the appointment. The responses that a client fills can be viewed with the appointment notification in the software itself.

If the sports facility or recreational center wants to know if the person booking the appointment is going to be bringing in a +1, then they can ask this and other similar questions easily with the help of the intake form.

The intake forms can be customized in a number of ways to accept answers in different formats such as checkboxes, lists, text areas, and other response types.


6. Display terms and conditions and ask members to agree to waivers

With the end of the pandemic nowhere in sight, an extra layer of protection is needed for the people who work at the sports facility and also for people who come to its resources. 

This added layer of protection can be displaying terms and conditions before booking an appointment and asking potential visitors to agree to waivers that waive off your liability of them catching the virus in your premises.

Appointy lets businesses display their terms and conditions and ask customers/members of the business to agree to waivers before booking an appointment. These terms and conditions and waivers can be completely customized to match the format and legal language of the sports facility and recreation centers.

Man biking in a sports facility center that uses Appoiny’s sports facility booking software

7. Accept online payments and avoid cash/card payments

It’s now widely known and accepted that people catch the illness by coming in contact with surfaces contaminated with the virus. However, people don’t realize how potentially risky accepting cash/card can be. A study, relevant now more than ever, shows that even money can be a source of communicable diseases.

To avoid the risk, more businesses are shifting to contactless payments. One of the ways you can do this is by opting for virtual payments through online transactions. Strictly say no to cash or card at your POS because they can be highly contaminated. This way you’re moving with the times and also staying ahead of the curve.

Appointy integrates with Square, Stripe, and Paypal to collect payments online and eliminate any physical exchange of money ensuring the safety of the staff and visitors/members of the sports facilities. 

Customer paying at recreation center using Appointy's contactless payments

Take the bull by the horns

COVID-19 is being classified as a “once in a century event”. There is a lot of uncertainty and despair in communities around the world. Everybody has questions and very few people have the right answers. 

What is for certain is that the days ahead are going to be challenging and tough. Things are not going to look “normal” for a while. However, we’re here to help steer you through the choppy waters to a safe, efficient, and profitable reopening in the “new normal.” 

With 10+ years of experience in the scheduling industry, we know a thing or two about scheduling 😉

Check out what Gareth Preston Personal Training, one of our clients from the United Kingdom had to say about Appointy:

Testimonial of a personal trainer, happy with Appointy's fitness management software

Do you own, manage, or work at a sports and fitness facility that is not sure how it can reopen safely? Well, we’d love to give you a hand in your reopening efforts. Get started with Appointy in 15 minutes with our critically acclaimed, 24×7 support team by your side.

Want us to give you a call? Let us know!

We would like to wish that you and your sports facility/recreational center have a smooth and grand reopening. 

Being an easy-to-use sports facility scheduling software, Appointy can help you implement state and federal regulations on social distancing and density guidelines, adapt to the post COVID-19 world and run your facility smoothly.” 

It’s important to be able to learn and adapt at the snap of your fingerprints in today’s uncertain world. It is always better to be one step ahead and lead the race, instead of being two steps behind and playing catch-up. So, are you ready to keep your team ahead in the game?


Disclaimer: The information which is summarised herein does not constitute medical or other professional advice and is general in nature. It does not take into account your specific circumstances and should not be acted on without full understanding of your current situation and future goals and objectives. In doing so you risk making commitment to a strategy that may not be suitable to your needs. Whilst we have tried to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the contents of this website, you should verify all information and facts independently.


About Appointy

We at Appointy, help business owners grow and run their businesses with our online scheduling software. This blog was a part of our ‘Manage your Business’ category, where we provide expert tips, and resources, or simply talk about the challenges that small and medium businesses face every day. 

If you have any thoughts on this blog or would like to chat about your business struggles and achievements, let us know in the comments below. 

We love a good talk!