Booking System

Why This Is Being Built

Testwood Lakes Sailability operates six Hansa 303 dinghies, each session carefully matched to a sailor's needs and abilities. Coordinating bookings across boats, instructors, and sailors with varying support requirements has traditionally relied on paper systems with some inevitable access contraints.

This system was developed by a volunteer to give TLS a purpose-built booking tool that reflects how the organisation actually works: sessions booked by coordinators and instructors, sensitive sailor information accessible to those who need it, and a clear view of what's happening on the water on any given day.

Design Goals

The system was built around a set of practical principles from the outset:

Fit for purpose, not over-engineered. Rather than adopting a complex commercial system designed for large leisure centres, this tool is tailored to the specific rhythm of TLS — Monday and Thursday sailing days, up to five hours of sailing, six known vessels.

No new infrastructure. The entire system runs within Google Workspace, which TLS already uses. There are no additional servers, hosting costs, or third-party subscriptions.

Accessible on any device. Whether an office coordinator is planning ahead on a desktop, an instructor checks the schedule on their phone before driving to the lake, or a volunteer at the pontoon needs to look up a sailor's support notes on a tablet — the same interface adapts to each situation.

Maintainable by volunteers. Configuration changes — new boats, adjusted session times, revised charges — are managed through a single readable configuration file, not a locked admin panel.

Integration with the TLS Sailing Days Calendar

Rather than maintaining a separate list of when sailing takes place, the system reads directly from the existing TLS sailing days Google Calendar. This means the booking interface automatically respects days when sailing is cancelled, bank holiday exclusions, and any future changes to the programme — with no duplication of effort. The sailing calendar remains the single source of truth for when the water is open.

Exploiting Google Workspace Resource Management

Google Workspace includes a professional resource booking system — the same infrastructure used by large organisations to manage meeting rooms and shared equipment. TLS's six Hansa dinghies are configured as bookable resources within the Workspace Admin Console.

This gives the booking system a solid, reliable foundation: resource availability is enforced at the platform level, bookings appear in Google Calendar's own views for coordinators who prefer them, and integration with existing Workspace tools requires no custom synchronisation. The dinghy booking interface provides an accessible, sailing-specific front end to something that would otherwise require navigating Google's own resource calendar — useful to an administrator but not to a volunteer instructor on a phone.

Security and Privacy by Design

Sailor support information — medical notes, hoist requirements, behavioural considerations — is sensitive personal data. The system handles this with a clear separation:

• The session schedule (which boat, which time, which instructor) is visible to all authorised users and appropriate for operational display.

• Sailor support notes and personal details sit in a separate, restricted calendar and are only surfaced through a dedicated modal panel, which automatically clears after a configurable timeout.

Access to the system requires a TLS Google Workspace account and membership of the authorised booking group. All data remains within the TLS Google Workspace environment — nothing is transmitted to external services or stored outside the organisation's own infrastructure.

Office, Phone, and Waterside Use

The interface is designed for three distinct contexts:

• In the office — a full schedule grid gives coordinators a clear overview of each sailing day, with the ability to book, cancel, and view maintenance blocks across all six boats at a glance.

• On a phone — a responsive layout switches automatically to a stacked list view in portrait orientation, with Info and Cancel actions clearly available. In landscape the full grid is accessible.

• At the pontoon — a shared tablet (needs to be sourced) , signed into a dedicated device account, provides immediate access to the day's schedule and sailor support notes without requiring individual logins. This replaces the paper log that has historically lived in a waterproof bag at the water's edge.