Lead time to book
Why we do not report how far ahead of play bookings are placed.
Status
We do not publish a lead time. Until August 2026 Club Insights showed a distribution of lead times and a median alongside it. Both are withdrawn and nothing takes their place. This page stays because the question is a fair one and the answer deserves a reason.
Why we do not report it
We observe the booking situation several times a day. For a court-hour that went, we therefore know between which two observations it went, not when exactly. Every booking carries a span rather than a moment. A distribution of moments, and a median taken from it, claim a precision this observation does not hold.
What the observation supports
If c hours pass between two observations, then no booking at all can be shown to have been placed within c hours of play: the last observation before play is itself already up to c hours old. Thresholds below that interval are therefore not provable at all. Above it the problem does not resolve itself. We measured how much booking activity sits close to a threshold, and the uncertain range stayed almost as wide as the figure itself. Something you can only know as a range does not belong on a tile as a number.
What comes instead
Nothing. A figure whose uncertainty is as wide as its own range is not a figure, and a more carefully worded version of the same number would be the same mistake in a quieter voice. That leaves these open: when exactly a booking was placed, how much was already taken before a play date first came into view, any threshold below one observation interval, a median over all bookings and any comparison of booking lead between clubs on different booking routes. What can be answered dependably is in the other metrics of this overview.
Withdrawn in August 2026. The page stays at its existing address so the reasoning sits where the number used to.
This page as of 17 Aug 2026. Changes to published figures