Choosing a booking, commerce & management system for a karting business

When you’re running a busy karting business, and potentially more attractions if you’re a multi-activity centre, you need more than just the ability to take bookings online. The online booking and management system sector is a more crowded space than ever before, with providers all offering different strengths and weaknesses.

What your business needs will of course be very unique to you, however below are the essential things that we think all karting business owners should be looking for from their chosen solution.

Bookings
Obviously a robust booking system will be your top priority initially, and the more intelligent it is, the more benefit you will see from it. Obviously you want an online booking system so your guests can book via your website, but you’ll also want a staff booking section for any phone or in-venue bookings.

You might also want a flexible booking structure, where you can change pricing so it’s higher in your busier periods and cheaper in your quieter periods to encourage footfall.

Memberships are also becoming increasingly popular, as guests look for a more affordable way of visiting their favourite attractions, and it keeps consistent income for a karting business by having a solid membership base.

You may also want to offer things like group, or birthday bookings, particularly as we come out of lockdown and people will be more keen than ever to socialise. It’s important your booking system also has the ability to manage waivers as well.

Finally, you’d ideally want your booking system to have transactional features that allow your customers to purchase add ons such as food and drink promos, merchandise or gear that they may need for karting – the front end of the solution should also be extremely intuitive and user friendly.

Food, drink and merchandise sales
Of course like all entertainment and leisure venues, entry and the experience is only one piece of the puzzle as most venues will have a food and drink offering of some sort.

With your booking, commerce and management system able to manage this aspect of your business it also keeps everything on one platform, making life easier for staff who will not have to learn how to use multiple systems.

We would also recommend having a table ordering system if possible, this was something that became popular due to COVID-19 introducing “social distancing” as something to abide by, however it has turned out to be extremely popular with consumers. You can find out a bit more about how our QR ordering system works here.

Reporting
As a business owner, or senior operations employee of a larger business, analysing the data behind your business is crucial.

You’ll want to review everything ranging from peak periods, your revisitation rate, your top selling f&b/merchandise and what your most successful marketing campaigns are.

With BookNow Software, our customers often build dashboards which report key performance indicators to them in real time, with the ability to quickly run a report for anything more specific, or out of the usual things they create reports on.

These can also easily be set up to email to you at a set period, allowing you to keep track of everything important to your business.

CRM
A powerful and robust CRM is integral for any karting business, allowing you to keep track of your customers. This was one of the reasons we chose to build BookNow Software on Salesforce, allowing customers to have a powerful booking system along with the world’s leading CRM system.

Having a good CRM will allow you to keep on top of all of your customers, any leads you may have and allow you to market to them. Speaking of which..

Marketing
Marketing your karting business will be essential as we come out of lockdown, as you’ll look to be as busy as possible after such a long period closed.

Having a booking and management system which can manage your marketing will make your life easier, as you can set up automation to manage a lot of the marketing work required, thanks to Salesforce’s flows feature.

The possibilities of marketing with BookNow Software’s system are endless, and you can read more about just a few marketing ideas here.

Integrations
As mentioned above, there are likely software companies you use that are integral to the way your business runs – from a finance perspective, right down to software that may manage your karts from an audit and safety perspective.

You’ll want to make sure that a booking and management system can integrate with these solutions too, which is why we made sure that BookNow can integrate with any solution which has an API.

This means our list of integrations could potentially be never ending, however you can take a look at just a few of our most popular integrations here.

We hope this has given you a quick overview of some of the key things a karting business should be looking for from their booking and management system, however if you have any further questions or would like a demo then please do get in touch using the form below.