BookMyBays Runs Golf Sim Bookings Without Anyone at the Front Desk
By Jeremy ·
A reader who runs a six-bay golf simulator lounge near Charlotte emailed me last week about the shared Google Calendar and a paper sign-in sheet his two part-time staff have used since he opened last year, and whether it was worth switching to something built for it before his busy season hit. He'd found BookMyBays through a Facebook group for sim operators and wanted a second opinion before signing up for anything, so I spent an afternoon going through it the way he would.
How Booking and Check-In Works
BookMyBays links to a live demo booking page from its own marketing site, so I ran a test booking through it the way a customer would: picked a bay, picked a time slot, and landed on a Stripe checkout screen without ever being asked to create an account. Apple Pay and Google Pay showed up next to the card fields. A confirmation email arrived within a couple of minutes and included a magic link for managing the booking later, so there's no password to lose track of either.
The part that would actually save my reader's staff time happens after checkout: a small Windows application called the BookMyBays Agent sits on the PC connected to each simulator, opens the sim software automatically when a booking starts, and closes it when the session ends. The owner sees bookings, revenue, and which bays are occupied from one dashboard, on any device.
The Venue Map and the BookMyBays Agent
I clicked into the sample floor plan on the demo account, bays laid out in curved rows with a VIP room and a bar off to the side, and booking from a map of the room you're walking into is a genuinely different experience than picking a slot off the plain list of times most booking software defaults to. A venue that doesn't want to draw its own floor plan just gets that plain list instead, which is still an option rather than a requirement.
Pairing an Agent to a bay takes a code generated in the dashboard, according to the setup docs, since I don't have a bay of my own to test it against. What the docs are clear about is the range of hardware it covers: the Agent doesn't tie a venue to a particular simulator brand, it works with any Windows-based sim software, which is what matters for a lounge that has added bays over a few years and ended up running a mix of kit from different vendors.
The Dashboard
I read through BookMyBays' own product walkthrough for this next part rather than working from a venue account of my own, and anyone who wants to check the screens properly can, because the trial runs 30 days on full access with no card required. The reporting covers what an operator would check day to day: today's bookings and revenue, current bay status, revenue split by payment method, bay utilization trends, and a peak hours and peak days heatmap, plus top customers by booking count and spend. Manual bookings, refunds, and membership management run through the same dashboard too, so front-of-house work wouldn't require switching between separate tools for scheduling and payments.
Who It's Built For
Tee-time booking software has existed for years, almost all of it built around 18-hole course scheduling, tee sheets, groups of four, weather-dependent cancellations. That's a different problem from a bay-by-bay simulator schedule running in fixed time blocks, where the product being booked is the simulator PC itself rather than a stretch of grass, and it's why the Agent and the bay-level dashboard exist in the first place. It fits a venue currently taking bookings over the phone or through a generic scheduler, with someone physically walking over to start the sim software before every session. It's not built for golf courses running tee sheets, and it's not a general scheduler with golf features bolted on afterward.
Pricing
This was the part my reader most wanted a number on, so I opened the pricing page half expecting to have to email someone for a figure, and it's all published on the page. The entry price is £30 a month for two simulators, with each additional bay added on top at £14 and that per-bay rate falling toward £7 as the count goes up. Venues running 35 or more simulators are asked to get in touch instead of self-serving. Prices are in sterling, which is worth knowing before anyone tries to match them against a US competitor's card.
For my reader's six bays, that's the base plus four add-ons, so £86 a month at the full £14 rate and less than that if the taper has already started by the fourth bay. Set against two part-timers spending part of every shift walking to bays and back, that's a straightforward trade.
The fee structure underneath it is the part I'd have expected to be worse. Regular bay bookings carry no platform fee at all, the 1% cut applies only to membership payments and event ticket sales, and Stripe's own charges (typically 1.4% and 20p a transaction) go to Stripe rather than to BookMyBays. Memberships, events and ticketing, gift cards, promo codes, dynamic pricing, CRM and team management are all in at the base price rather than parceled out into tiers, which is not how this category usually prices itself.
Getting from signup to a live booking page takes about fifteen minutes with no developer involved, or so BookMyBays says. That's a reasonable claim for a hosted booking page wired to Stripe, though it's their framing rather than something I timed myself.
I sent my reader the pricing page and told him to start the trial in the quiet part of the week rather than the week before his busy season, since the only real work in the whole setup is walking the Agent onto six sim PCs one at a time.