Unlocking Access: How Tennis Northland’s Igloo Lock is Revolutionizing Casual Court Bookings

Tennis Northland Incorporated is a non-profit regional sporting organisation that fosters and promotes the game of tennis in the Northland region. There are 19 clubs and affiliates that comprise the Tennis Northland Association.

Tennis Northland’s mission is "more people, playing more tennis, more often".

Tennis Northland headquarters are at Thomas Neale Memorial Park, 42-56 Winger Crescent, Whangārei - a magnificent venue with 12 outdoor floodlit courts. Six are Plexipave and six are Astro Turf.

Could people book courts for casual play before Igloo Lock was installed at Thomas Neale Tennis Centre?

Before installing the Igloo Lock at Thomas Neale Family Memorial Park, it was difficult for people to book courts for casual play. Casual bookings could only be made via email or phone and had to be arranged around a time where someone could open up the gate for the casual user. Due to this, we would only receive a handful of casual bookings each year, leaving our courts underutilised and limiting our income potential from this revenue stream.

What challenges or problems did the venue hope to overcome and were these contributing factors in accessing the Padlock Book a Court solution?

As our courts are a regional facility, we do not have a membership base that uses the courts like you would typically see at a tennis club. Our facility is primarily used for tournaments and for regular weekly bookings by the Whangarei Veterans Tennis Club and the Northland Tennis Seniors. We installed the Igloo Lock so that our courts could be available for casual use by the Northland community outside of these times.

We're only a few weeks into using the Igloo Lock, however, the response from the community has been really positive. We have casual booking rates as well as annual court booking memberships to suit the wide range of people who want to book a court at our facility. This has been a great solution for those who don't want to join a tennis club but still want to go for a hit every so often, and also for members of other tennis clubs who want to use our courts.

The team at Tennis NZ and Clubspark made the setup of Book a Court and the Igloo Lock really easy, and they were always on hand to help if we had any questions.