What is VenueBookr?
A complete booking platform for leisure venues: online bookings, payments, digital waivers, gift vouchers, memberships, resource management and reporting in one system — configured around your venue's own rules.
What kinds of venues is it for?
Session-based leisure venues — family entertainment centres, trampoline parks, soft play, escape rooms, laser tag, mini golf, climbing, karting, axe throwing, rage rooms and multi-activity centres. Basically anywhere that sells tickets, activities or fun. If you run bookable sessions with real capacity and safety rules, it fits — if it's bookable, it's VenueBookrable.
How do we get set up?
Personally. Every venue is onboarded by us — we configure your products, pricing, waivers and policies around how you actually run, together. There's no "figure it out yourself" signup form, by design. You also get a dedicated account manager — a real person you can actually speak to, who knows your venue and your setup, guides you through it and is there when you need them. Not a ticket queue.
Do we need new hardware?
No. VenueBookr runs in a browser — your existing computers, tablets and phones are fine. Shared front-desk devices can use staff PINs so everyone works under their own identity on one till.
How do customers book?
On your own branded booking page, built mobile-first because that's where most bookings happen — with passwordless sign-in, so there's no password to forget between visits. You can also embed the booking widget straight into your existing website, and the builder makes the one you actually want: scope it to a category or a hand-picked set of activities (so a "Groups" page sells only your group activities), set the party size it opens on, bake in a discount code, or build a single-purpose one that sells only gift vouchers or memberships. Customers book inside the panel — no redirect, your branding intact.
Can customers book more than one activity in a visit?
Yes — that's a signature feature. Customers build a multi-activity visit in one basket, and the system only offers time slots that genuinely work back to back, including your changeover buffers, and each activity can carry its own party ("six throw, four rage"). If you'd rather sell a set combination as a deal, make it a package: one name, one price you set, one booking fee, booked in a single tap. One payment, one confirmation, one reference.
How do payments work?
Card payments run through Stripe or Square — your choice — connected to your own account, so your money settles directly to you. Staff can also record cash, card-machine, deposit and invoice payments against a booking.
Coming soon: PayMyBit — one organiser books and each guest pays their own named share, so nobody is chasing eleven friends for £14 — and tap-to-pay card machines that take the payment straight into the booking, instead of keying the amount into a terminal and then into the system a second time.
Can we take deposits, or invoice groups?
Both. Take a deposit with the balance tracked as owed, hold a reservation to pay later, or run the booking on invoice — with a proper request-for-payment document first and a VAT invoice once paid. Built for schools and corporate groups.
Does it handle VAT?
Yes — UK VAT is built in: VAT-inclusive pricing, VAT invoices with sequential numbering once a qualifying booking is paid, and credit notes that reverse VAT correctly on refunds. It works with the accounting scheme you're actually on — standard (accrual), cash accounting or flat rate (with your HMRC sector percentage) — so what you hand your accountant matches how you're registered, rather than needing to be re-worked.
Can we run a strict no-refund policy — and still look reasonable?
Yes, and you can make money from it. Set your terms to no cancellations and no refunds if that's how your venue works, then offer a Cancellation Policy Waiver as a paid add-on at checkout: for a few pounds the customer buys the right to cancel under terms you set. The customer gets the flexibility they wanted, you keep the certainty you needed — and it is additional revenue on bookings you were taking anyway. You set the price (fixed or a percentage), the notice period and how much it refunds; it's VAT-handled and refundable in its own right. Every booking shows whether it was bought.
What happens on refunds?
Refunds unwind the way the booking was paid — card money back to the card, voucher-paid portions back to a voucher, and where enabled, amounts can be returned as account credit. Every movement lands in the booking's ledger.
How do waivers work?
Digitally, before arrival. One adult can sign a single family waiver covering themselves and their children. Dates of birth are captured so age rules are real, and retention periods are computed automatically to match insurance requirements. Write each activity's clause once on its category and every product in it picks it up. Anyone who turns up unsigned can scan a QR code at the door and sign on their own phone, and it attaches itself to the right seat on the booking. You can also collect photo & video consent properly — a separate, never-pre-ticked opt-in in your own words, so "not asked" is never mistaken for "agreed" when you're deciding what you can post.
Can it enforce our safety rules?
Yes — and at booking time, not at the door. Age confirmation for 18+ activities, child-to-adult ratio rules, hard capacity limits per session, and evacuation flags for who's in the building.
Do you support gift vouchers?
Fully: sold online from your branded gift page, delivered by email with a PDF, schedulable for a future date (birthdays), redeemable at checkout with partial balances tracked, and usable across a mixed-party booking. Customers can also buy activity-based vouchers — "an Ultimate Rage Room for two" rather than a cash amount — and if your price has gone up by the time it's redeemed, the experience is honoured at the price on the day it was bought.
Memberships and loyalty?
Both, natively. Paid membership plans with member pricing and benefits, family/household plans sharing one allowance, and loyalty tiers customers earn automatically from real visits and spend — all applied correctly at checkout. Plans can be sold online or at the counter, and can renew themselves on a saved card, with notice given beforehand and the customer able to stop it. Memberships also cover passes: terms measured in hours or days as well as months, an allowance that doesn't reset each period, and credits — so "any 3 activities" can't hand over a £40 room at £15 prices.
Can customers change their own bookings?
Yes — from a secure manage-booking page: reschedule, cancel, add a guest, pay a balance. All of it inside the cut-offs and policies you set, so self-service never breaks your rules.
Does it send reminders?
Yes — booking confirmations and pre-visit reminders by email, and SMS where enabled. Every template is editable, so the words are yours. Beyond that it's a rules engine, not a fixed list: you decide what sends, to whom and when — a reminder the day before, a review request after the visit, a come-back nudge months later, and alerts to your own team (a new booking, a cancellation) routed to the right people rather than everybody. Customers can also message you back, and the reply lands against their booking instead of in a shared inbox nobody owns.
We already have bookings and customers. Can we bring them across?
Yes — a CSV importer with column mapping brings bookings and customers over from your current system, and imports can be rolled back if a file was wrong.
Can we see the bookings we're losing — not just the ones we take?
Yes, and it's the report most systems don't have. Every other number tells you what sold; the pre-bookings report is the record of what was attempted. Every checkout session is grouped with one of four outcomes — live now · became a booking · ran out of time · left — and a finished-and-booked rate that ignores sessions still in progress, so the figure isn't flattered.
Each row names what they were holding (the actual activity or package, not just a time), the party size, and when they were on the site — which is a different question from the date they were trying to book, so you can filter on either. There's also the internet address, badged when it appears more than once: one person who tried four times is a completely different problem from four people who each gave up, and until you can see that you're guessing.
Alongside it, live visitor counts: who is on your booking page right now, and how many came today, this week and this month. It's counted by a first-party beacon that stores nothing on the visitor's device, so it needs no cookie banner of its own. When you change your prices or your booking page, you can see what it did — instead of waiting a month and guessing.
Can we sell food, drinks and merchandise too?
Today you can sell extras alongside a booking — drinks, snacks, merchandise — priced and VAT-handled with the rest of the basket, with optional stock control.
Coming soon: a full point of sale. A proper till for over-the-counter selling with full inventory control across food, drinks, snacks and merchandise — and orders sent straight to the kitchen, so the bar and the booking system stop being two separate businesses that happen to share a building.
We have more than one site.
Multi-location is native: one organisation, multiple locations, each with its own products, settings and branding — and your subscription is priced per location. You can also build a product once and share it across every site: the name, description, photos, duration, capacity, waiver and content are managed centrally and published to each location, while each site keeps its own price, availability, spaces and cancellation terms. Change the description once and it updates everywhere; the things that genuinely differ site to site stay local.
What about staff permissions?
A proper role ladder (owner → manager → staff) with per-action permission toggles, location-scoped access, and an audit trail of who did what. You can also build your own roles — copy a built-in one, switch individual permissions on or off, name it whatever your venue calls that job — so "Duty Manager" means what it means to you rather than what it meant to us. Sensitive actions (refunds, financials, GDPR) can be restricted to the people you choose, and it's enforced on the server, not just hidden in the screen.
Is it GDPR-friendly?
Data protection is designed in: customer data export and erasure tooling, waiver retention computed per record, and access controls throughout. Formal policy documents are part of onboarding.
What does it cost?
£249 per month per venue, or £2,490 a year (twelve months for the price of ten) on the Founders Plan — every feature included, no per-feature add-ons and no commission on your bookings. It's limited to the first 20 venues; after that the price changes, and anyone already on it stays on it.
What if we need something it doesn't do?
This is the actual difference: VenueBookr's founding principle is that the software bends to the venue. A "strange request" is usually already a setting; when it isn't, we scope it with you and build it as a configurable feature — not a one-off hack.