What is a booking block?
A booking block is a deliberate, internal reservation of one or more time slots, resources, or spaces that makes them unavailable to the general public, without necessarily being tied to a specific paying customer. Unlike a normal Booking / Reservation, a block exists purely to protect capacity for an operational or strategic reason: a maintenance task, a private tournament, a member-only competition, or simply a deliberate reduction of supply during a slow period to concentrate demand.
Booking blocks are one of the least visible but most important tools a golf club has for keeping its Tee Sheet coherent. Without them, the Online Booking Engine would happily sell a tee time to the public during a maintenance window like Aeration, or during a shotgun-start tournament that needs the entire course.
Common reasons to create a booking block
- Course maintenance: aeration, Overseeding, or other agronomic work that requires closing part or all of the course.
- Tournaments and events: a Shotgun Start or member competition that occupies the entire Tee Sheet for a morning.
- Member-only windows: some clubs reserve early morning or weekend slots exclusively for members, blocking them from public sale.
- Contracted allotments: capacity pre-agreed with a Tour Operator that must be held regardless of general demand.
Why blocks need to be managed centrally
A block created in one system but not reflected in the public booking engine is worse than no block at all, because it creates a false sense of security. Golfmanager treats blocks as a first-class part of the Tee Sheet, so the moment a block is created — for example when a tournament is scheduled through the Tournaments module — the corresponding slots disappear instantly from public availability, with no risk of a double-sale.
Practical example
A club schedules a members-only medal competition for Sunday morning. Creating a single booking block for that morning automatically removes those tee times from the online engine, while still allowing staff to manually assign competitors to specific slots internally — avoiding the need to manually cancel any public bookings that might otherwise have slipped through.
FAQs
Is a booking block the same as a cancellation? No — a block prevents new bookings from being made; it doesn’t cancel any bookings that already exist in that slot (those should be handled separately if a conflict arises).
Can a booking block be partial? Yes, a block can cover an entire day, a specific time range, or even just a subset of resources (for example, only the first nine holes).