How to Calculate and Increase Court Utilization

Utilization = booked court-hours ÷ available court-hours × 100. Available court-hours is courts × open hours, minus time the courts are closed for maintenance or weather. Booked court-hours counts every hour a court is reserved, whether by a member, a guest, a clinic or a league.

Example: 8 courts open 6am to 10pm, seven days a week, is 8 × 16 × 7 = 896 available court-hours a week. If 560 of them are booked, utilization is 560 ÷ 896 = 62.5%.

Calculate it by hour and day of week, not just as a weekly total. A club at 62.5% overall can be at 95% on weekday evenings and 25% on weekday mornings, and those two numbers call for opposite decisions.

One percentage point of utilization is 1% of your available court-hours. On 8 courts open 16 hours a day, that is 8.96 court-hours a week. At an average realised rate of $40 per court-hour, one point is worth $358 a week, or about $18,600 a year. On 4 courts it is about $9,300 a year at the same rate; on 16 courts, about $37,300.

Use your own average realised rate (total court revenue ÷ booked court-hours, after member discounts), not your list price. The point of the arithmetic is to put a dollar figure next to each idea, so a clinic that fills a dead Tuesday morning can be compared with a price change on Thursday night.

Most owners know roughly when it is quiet. A report by hour and day of week, over several weeks, is more precise and often surprising: the dead slot may be Wednesday at 2pm rather than Tuesday at 10am, or one court may book worse than its neighbours at the same hour, which points to lighting, surface or location rather than demand.

An empty court earns nothing. A recurring beginner clinic, a social or a weekday league gives people a reason to come at a time they otherwise would not, and it is priced per head rather than per court. Recurring programs build attendance better than one-off events, so target slots that are weak every week, not occasionally.

If evenings sell out and mornings sit empty, price is the most direct lever. A simple structure (peak, standard, off-peak) captures most of the benefit; it does not need a dynamic pricing engine. Set the gap from your own data: if peak slots still sell out days ahead after a change, the gap is too small; if off-peak slots stay empty at the lower price, the problem is the slot, not the price.

A cancelled peak-hour booking with no waitlist behind it is a court that goes empty in the busiest part of the week. A paper list or a group text is too slow; by the time someone is reached, they have made other plans. An automatic waitlist that promotes and notifies the next person recovers those hours without staff time.

Record the slot's utilization before a change, wait three or four weeks, and compare. Watch the neighbouring slots too: a discount that fills 10am by emptying 11am has moved demand, not created it.

Courtlines records every booking against its court, day and hour, and court prices can vary by court, weekday and hour, so off-peak pricing is a setting rather than a workaround. Clinics, leagues and socials run as programs on the same grid, and waitlists promote and notify the next person automatically when a spot opens.

A nightly AI advisor reads the last 30 days of fill rate, revenue and memberships and sends three ranked recommendations each morning, each with a dollar estimate and a confidence score, which is the same arithmetic as this guide done for you on your own numbers.