Lottery System for Courts

This would be a useful feature for our Pickleball Club also. If this is implemented, would like to have the ability to schedule when the "lottery process" occurs (ie: how many days and hours before the reservation slots occur) and the ability to designate the specific courts that are available for lottery (so that only a sub-set of courts are part of the lottery).

We have popular courts at particular locations.  We need a fair way to allocate all the requests for limited courts.  I would be nice to be able to select the courts within the lottery.

This suggestion was marked as Accepted 5 months ago. Does this mean a lottery system for courts is being developed? If so, how soon before it's ready?

Hi Scott, 

The Accepted tag means it's a project we think could be implemented at some point. When the status changes to In Development that means our developers are working on it.

• Just some thoughts:
  • Fairness consideration would be good here. The allocation process should aim to be fair within a given time period.
  • Our high-usage time slots are monopolized by a small percentage of our membership who are willing to get up early and race to make bookings.
  • Some members complain about disadvantages due to having to book for 4 players, or having a slower internet connection. A lottery system would help them too.
  • It would be great to be able to open up the lottery system for reservations a day or two in advance of the opening of reservation slots, so that closer to the date of play people could still just book what they want.
    

Lottery that is randomized seems fairest.

An issue we had with the lottery system in our previous system was that it was based on number of days played in the last 30 days.  This seemed fine at first, but being a snowbird centric location, when the snowbirds returned, the year-round members had points in the system, so they would go a couple of weeks not being able to play until things normalized.

This feature is in QA and scheduled for a BETA release very soon.  To keep this lower in scope, we are simply giving the ability for organizations to turn this on at the time your new bookings open, and allowing you to configure a predetermined "queueing" time, like 30 to 60 seconds, to let all the requests come in. A randomizer will allocate the courts based on the requests during that time. This is a great start, and we will improve from here.

This feature will be ready for BETA testing in the next few weeks. Do we have any volunteers who would be willing to test it out and provide feedback?  If so, please respond to this email and let us know! 

Will this feature also be available for Events? 

Our club does not have contract time, so people are used to booking fast to get their "regular" time slots. Turning the lottery on for all courts and time slots at once would likely be quite disruptive.

It would be great to be able to set the day-of-week and time ranges, and select the courts subject to lottery. One flavor of this, simple but not the most general, would be to be able to turn it on for Prime Times. If that were available, we'd likely try it right away, because those are high-demand times where we especially want fairness.

This feature is currently available in closed beta! We released it to anyone who had expressed interest and in support. If you're interested in using Reservation Lottery in it's current beta state, please reach out to our Customer Success Team via live chat support or [email protected] and we will happily put this in your organization. Here is a link to the Knowledge Base article detailing how this feature currently works.