How sessions and court time work

A session is one specific time that one specific service runs, on one specific court. It is what players actually book.

A session is court time, not free time

This is the model the whole product is built on, and it is where Arvald differs from a generic calendar tool.

Putting a session up means you hold that court at that time. It does not mean you happen to be free then. If you have not booked the court, do not put the session up, because a player who books it has bought something you cannot deliver.

Arvald does not book courts and does not cancel them. You keep doing that wherever you do it now: your club's system, the council's, the hall's, Matchi, a phone call. Arvald handles what happens after the court is yours, which is showing the slot, taking the money, and telling you who is coming.

That split is on purpose. Court booking systems are different at every venue and mostly not open to integrate with, so pretending to own that step would make Arvald wrong about reality rather than useful.

Court guaranteed, or not

When you create a session you say whether the court is guaranteed ("You've secured a court for this time") or not guaranteed ("Court still to be confirmed").

Use "not guaranteed" honestly. It is for the case where you are fairly sure you will get a court and want to start filling the session while you sort it out. Players see the difference, and a coach who marks everything guaranteed and then moves people around will spend the goodwill quickly.

Where a session happens

A session names a location and, optionally, the court numbers you booked there. The location is the venue, saved once with an address and reused; the court numbers are per session, because you often book different courts each week. See how locations work.

Sessions that belong to a term

A session can be part of a term: a ten-week squad, a holiday block, a set of clinics. The term is a group of sessions run as one program, and players see its name on each session.

The important part is that the term is its sessions. Each one is a normal session, and you can change or cancel any single week without disturbing the rest. A session you edit on its own stops following the term, so a later change to the whole term skips it.

Whether those sessions are separately bookable depends on how you sell the term. Sold week by week, each is an ordinary session. Sold as one purchase, the individual weeks are not for sale on their own, except a week a term player has given up. Full detail in Terms and repeating sessions.

What a session inherits

A session takes its price, capacity and cancellation policy from its service, and its default location too, so most of the time you only set the time and the courts. You can override capacity, price and policy on an individual session by editing it after it exists.

What you cannot set yet

Two things exist underneath but have no control in the dashboard today, for single sessions and for terms alike:

• A booking cutoff, the point at which a session stops accepting bookings.
• A cancel-by deadline, the point at which your venue makes you decide whether to keep or release the court.

Since you cannot set either, the booking cutoff falls back to the session's own start time and the cancel-by deadline is simply not recorded. In practice that means a session stays bookable right up to the moment it starts, and nothing in Arvald reminds you that a venue deadline is approaching. Keep tracking those deadlines wherever you track them now.

Visibility

Sessions carry a public or unlisted visibility flag in the data model, but there is no control for it in the dashboard either. Every session you create is public on your booking page.