Conflict Management

Overview

Double bookings are the nightmare scenario. Two groups show up for the same court at the same time, both with confirmations in hand, both looking at you like it's your fault. Fieldspace exists to make sure that never happens.

Here's what we do:

• Prevent overlapping bookings automatically
• Catch potential conflicts before they become problems
• Help you resolve the occasional conflict that slips through
• Manage waitlists so people can queue for popular times

Conflict Prevention

The simple version: if a time slot is booked, nobody else can book it. When someone tries:

• The slot shows as unavailable
• They see what times ARE available
• They can join the waitlist if you've got one set up

This applies to everyone—customers booking online and staff booking through the dashboard. No exceptions unless someone with Manager or Admin permissions deliberately overrides it (useful for things like shared practice time where two groups can use the same court).

Detecting Conflicts

Fieldspace is constantly checking for potential problems:

• Real-time validation — Every booking gets checked before it's created
• Recurring booking analysis — If you set up a 16-week lesson series, we check all 16 weeks for conflicts
• Import validation — Bulk importing a bunch of bookings? We check them against each other too
• Calendar sync conflicts — If two-way sync is on and someone moves a booking via Google Calendar, we validate the new time

Resolving Conflicts

Sometimes conflicts happen despite our best efforts—maybe someone imported bad data, or there was a miscommunication. When you find one, here's what you can do:

• Move one booking — Reschedule to a different time or different court
• Cancel one booking — Remove the conflicting reservation entirely
• Shorten a booking — Sometimes trimming 15 minutes fixes the overlap
• Allow the overlap — If it's actually okay for both groups to share the space, you can approve it

Fieldspace shows you who's affected and helps you communicate. If you need to move someone's booking, we can automatically notify them about the change.

Waitlists

Popular times fill up. Rather than turning people away, let them join a waitlist:

1. Someone wants a time that's already booked
2. They join the waitlist with their contact info
3. If the original booking cancels, the first person on the list gets notified
4. They have a set time window to claim it before we move to the next person

You can configure per facility:

• Maximum waitlist length (don't want 50 people waiting for one slot)
• How long people have to respond (4 hours? 24 hours?)
• Whether to offer spots automatically or let staff do it manually

Waitlists are great for high-demand times like Saturday morning tennis or weekday evening basketball. They also give you insight into unmet demand—if the waitlist is always full, maybe you need more capacity.

Conflict Notifications

Don't want to constantly monitor for problems? We'll let you know:

• Email alerts — Get notified immediately when a conflict is detected
• Dashboard warnings — Conflicts show up with indicators in the calendar
• Daily digest — Get a summary of any unresolved issues each morning

Configure what notifications you want (and how often) in Settings → Notifications. Most people leave email alerts on for conflicts—it's one of those things you want to know about right away.