BookMyBays Runs Golf Sim Bookings Without Anyone at the Front Desk

Most golf simulator venues still run bookings the way a barbershop did in 2005: phone calls, a shared calendar, and someone walking over to start the sim software before a customer's slot begins. BookMyBays is built to remove all three steps. It's booking, payment, and remote bay control in one system, aimed specifically at golf sim venues, indoor sim lounges, and driving ranges rather than golf courses in general.

How Booking and Check-In Works

A customer lands on the venue's branded booking page, picks a bay and a time slot, and pays. There's no account to create and no login form standing between them and a price. Payment runs through Stripe, with Apple Pay and Google Pay as options, and the confirmation email includes a magic link so the customer can manage or check their booking later without a password.

The part that actually removes staff labor is what happens next. A small Windows application called the BookMyBays Agent runs on the PC connected to each simulator. At the start of a booking, it opens the sim software automatically. At the end, it closes it. Nobody has to walk over, unlock a bay, or remember to shut it down between sessions. The owner sees the whole thing, bookings, revenue, and which bays are occupied, from one dashboard on any device.

The Venue Map and the BookMyBays Agent

Venues can sketch their actual floor plan in the dashboard: bays, VIP rooms, walkways, reception, the bar. The editor supports curved rows, multiple levels, and outdoor zones, and customers booking through that map see the room they're walking into rather than a generic list. It's optional. A venue that doesn't want to build a floor plan just gets a straightforward list of available bays and times instead.

The Agent side of the system is paired to a bay once, using a code generated in the dashboard, and after that it runs unattended. The dashboard shows each bay's live status, online, in a session, or offline, and gives the operator remote restart, close, and shutdown commands if something needs a reset. BookMyBays doesn't require a specific simulator brand. The Agent works with any Windows-based sim software, which matters for venues running a mix of hardware from different vendors.

The Dashboard

The reporting side covers what an operator actually checks day to day: today's bookings and revenue, current bay status, revenue broken out by payment method, bay utilization percentage and trends, and a peak hours and peak days heatmap. It also surfaces top customers by booking count and spend. Manual bookings, refunds, and membership management run through the same dashboard, so front-of-house work doesn't require switching between separate tools for scheduling and payments.

Who It's Built For

Tee-time booking software has existed for years, but almost all of it is built around 18-hole course scheduling: tee sheets, groups of four, weather-dependent cancellations. That's a different problem from managing a bay-by-bay simulator schedule where sessions run in fixed time blocks and the "product" is the simulator PC itself, not a stretch of grass. BookMyBays is scoped to the second problem, which is why the Agent and the bay-level dashboard exist at all. It fits a venue that's currently taking bookings over the phone or through a generic scheduling tool and having someone physically manage the sim software for every session. It's not aimed at traditional golf courses running tee sheets, and it's not a general-purpose appointment scheduler with golf features bolted on.

What It Doesn't Tell You

Pricing isn't published anywhere on the marketing site. The onboarding claim is that a venue can go from signing up to a live booking page in about fifteen minutes with no developer involved, which is a reasonable claim for a hosted booking page and Stripe integration, but it's BookMyBays' own framing and not something outside the company has verified.

The bigger dependency is the Agent itself. It's a Windows application, so a venue running Mac-based control systems or simulator software that isn't Windows-native won't be able to use the automatic lock and unlock feature, even if the booking and payment side would still work fine. It's also not clear from the public material what happens if a bay's PC loses network connectivity mid-session, whether the sim just keeps running as-is or the Agent needs a live connection to function at all. That's worth confirming directly before relying on it for a venue with unreliable internet.

For a venue that's outgrown phone bookings and a shared spreadsheet, and where staff are spending real time each shift walking bays to start and stop sim software, BookMyBays addresses both problems in one system rather than requiring separate tools for scheduling and hardware control. The open question, since it isn't answered on the site, is what it costs once a venue is running enough bays for that to matter.