Every vendor demo shows you a calendar and it always looks fine. The problems that make venues switch again eighteen months later are never visible in a demo — they're in the resource model, the payment arrangement, the migration and the contract. These are the questions that surface them, including the ones we'd rather you asked us.
Start here, because these three answers constrain everything else and they're the hardest to change later. A venue can live with awkward scheduling; it struggles to recover from discovering it doesn't control its own customer relationships.
If the answer is "ours, and we pay you out", understand what follows: your money arrives on their payout cycle rather than your acquirer's settlement schedule, refunds and chargebacks go through their support queue, and every saved card and recurring mandate belongs to their processing account. That last one is the quiet part — it means leaving requires every member to re-enter payment details, which is a switching cost disguised as a technical detail.
A bad answer sounds like: a long explanation of why their integrated payments are simpler. It might genuinely be simpler. Simpler isn't the question you asked.
Not "is there an export" — every vendor says yes. Ask to see it during the trial, and check what's actually in the file: contact details, booking history, membership status, remaining credits, marketing consent. An export that gives you names and emails but not credit balances or consent status is not a migration path.
Relevant mostly with marketplaces and consumer-app platforms, where the answer is legitimately "we do" — and that can be a good trade if they're bringing you customers you'd never have reached. What matters is knowing which arrangement you're in before you build your business on it. We've written about that trade-off in more detail on the Playtomic comparison.
Every booking system demos well against a simple case: one court, one hour, one person. Your business is not the simple case, and the gap between the two is where the next eighteen months of workarounds live.
Don't let the demo pick the example. Bring the awkward one — the thing your current system can't do, or does badly. Some real ones we hear:
If the answer involves creating duplicate resources, fake customer accounts, or "you'd handle that manually" — that's your future weekly admin, quantified. Ask how many clicks, then multiply by your booking volume.
Per venue is a warning sign for anyone with genuinely different inventory: indoor and outdoor, floodlit and daylight, a show court and a back court. If everything must share a price, you'll be leaving money on your best resources to avoid overcharging on your worst.
Ask specifically whether a released booking returns to public availability automatically. It sounds minor. It's the difference between an easy cancellation policy being a revenue protection and being a revenue leak — a slot you let someone release but can't resell is the same loss as a no-show.
Commission models are seductive at low volume and painful at high volume — the fee scales exactly as you succeed. Flat subscriptions are the reverse. Do the arithmetic at your realistic volume in two years, not today's. Vendors quoting commission will usually not do this arithmetic for you.
Ask for the list, not the tier name. "White-label" in particular means at least four different things — a branded page, a page on your own domain, embedding into your website, and branded mobile apps — and they're routinely priced at different tiers while sharing one word on the pricing page. We've listed exactly which of those sit where on our own white-label page, and we'd suggest asking every vendor to do the same.
Separate from the subscription, and often not on the pricing page. Ask for the total first-year cost in writing, including any data migration charge.
Migration is where the real risk sits, and almost nobody interrogates it during evaluation because it feels like a problem for later. It isn't; the answers determine whether you can switch at all.
Customers and future bookings is the easy part. The list that matters is the rest: active memberships with their renewal dates, remaining class-pack credits, wallet balances, on-account customers and their terms, and marketing consent. Anything not on the list is something your staff will re-enter by hand or lose.
A cutover with no overlap is a bad idea in a live venue mid-season. Ask whether the old system can go read-only while your team works the new one, and specifically whether you can get through one full renewal cycle before switching off — recurring memberships are where a botched migration does lasting damage, because a member charged twice or not at all is a member you may not keep.
If customers have bookmarked a booking page, or you've been running ads pointing at one, those URLs need to redirect rather than break.
Three questions, all boring, all worth asking before rather than after.
If you want one page to take into a demo, this is it. Score each vendor honestly, including us.
We publish this knowing it's a list we can be measured against, and that we don't win every row for every venue — a marketplace will beat us on bringing you new players, and a single-discipline studio platform may fit a studio better. A venue that switches for the wrong reason churns within a year, which is worse for us than never signing them.
If you'd like to run the scorecard against Real Sports Bookings, the free Starter plan is enough to test most of it yourself, or get in touch and we'll go through it with you — including the rows where the answer isn't the one we'd like.