11th September 2020
Dear Everybody Members
We wanted to take this opportunity to recognise the current issues and challenges customers are experiencing with our online bookings system for swimming sessions.
In order to make our pools covid secure we have followed Swim England guidance to have dedicated the use of the pools within our programme with restricted capacity. Therefore we now have availability for lane swims, learner pool swims and family swim sessions within our programme across our 9 indoor pools. Each of these must be booked in advance online.
The current system unfortunately wasn’t designed for this purpose and we have had to adapt our group fitness booking portal to accommodate, and as such acknowledge this isn’t currently offering the high standards that we expect.
When we launched online bookings for group exercise classes over 4 years ago, it was never intended to be used for swimming sessions, but due to the COVID pandemic guidance on social distancing, and to ensure that we are fully compliant with the NHS Track and Trace system, it is important that all of our activities are pre-booked, and so we extended our current booking system to include ‘swimming’ as a bookable activity.
The system that we use is widely used by a number of other leisure and gym operators and we are all adapting as best we can under the current situation.
However, whilst the booking system works well for group exercise and gym sessions – with almost 50,000 sessions booked successfully in August. Swimming sessions bookings require much more flexibility. So, we have considered your feedback and have now invested in developing this and are working really hard behind the scenes to improve the XN Leisure booking system, to make the system work better for you all. We are currently testing a new improved way of making bookings which we hope to launch before the end of September.
During the switch over there may be a period of down time (no more than 1 day) where swimming sessions will be unavailable to book so we can move to the new way of booking.
From all here at Everybody we want to thank all our swimming customers for your patience during this time. We really appreciate your understanding and the positive feedback from those who we have welcomed back into our swimming pools already and look forward to safely welcoming back those returning in the coming weeks.
We will keep updating you with our progress, but in the meantime if you need support you can email our support desk or ask at your local reception and we will try our best to get you returning to swimming and other activities as quickly as possible.