Almost every padel club in the Canaries works with a booking platform. It works, it fills empty slots and it saves phone calls. But there is one question that rarely comes up in the club office: when a member books a court, whose member is that?
What a marketplace does well
It is worth starting there, because it is true. A marketplace solves real problems: the player books at eleven at night without bothering anyone, pays in advance, and the club stops losing hours on WhatsApp. It also brings in new people who do not know the club yet.
That last point is what makes it so hard to let go of, and rightly so.
What it costs you, and rarely shows up on the invoice
You can see the commission. The rest, not so much:
The account belongs to the platform. The player signs up there, not at your club. Their level, their history and their email live in a system you do not control.
The traffic goes to their domain. Every time someone looks you up on Google and ends up booking there, the visit counts for them.
You appear next to the club down the road. One listing among many, one click away. If the player switches clubs, the platform loses nothing. You do.
There is no room for your sponsors. The advertising on display is theirs. On your own site, that space could belong to your shop or your brands.
This is not a padel thing. It is exactly what happens to a hotel on Booking.com or a barbershop on Booksy. The middleman fills the calendar, yes, but keeps the relationship, the data and the brand. And the day the commission goes up, the business has nowhere else to go.
Two ways to be online
On the left, the player enters the platform. On the right, they enter your house.
The difference, point by point
Marketplace
Your own platform
Who owns the player account?
The platform
The club
Where does the traffic go?
To their domain
To your address
Who appears next to your club?
The clubs next door
Nobody
Can you place sponsors?
No
Yes, on your own page
Who is the customer?
The player
The club
What Padelante is
Padelante is the club's own portal for what happens between one booking and the next: the members' ranking, the academy and the tournaments. It runs on the club's own address, with its logo and its colours, and the database belongs to the club, exportable at any time. It runs on the club’s own domain, for example ranking.yourclub.com, connected with one CNAME record; a club without a website starts at yourclub.padelante.app.
The ranking is permanent, not an eight-week league: every match between members counts, all year round. One player reports the result, the opposing team has twelve hours to reject it if they disagree, and if nobody says anything the match counts on its own. Disagreements are settled by the club.
My customer is the club. Your members stay yours: Padelante never talks to them on its own account.
And what you do not have to change
Padelante also offers court booking, but you do not have to use it. If your current system works, keep it: Padelante sits alongside, without touching your till. There is no exclusivity either, and each module can be used on its own. Just the ranking, just the academy, bookings, or everything together.
Quick questions
Do we have to drop our booking platform?
No. They are different things and they coexist without trouble.
Will the players actually enter results?
It is the most honest question of all. They do when something is at stake, which is why the ranking is permanent rather than seasonal. On top of that, the club can see who has not reported for a while and mention it at reception, which works better than any notification.
What about self-employed coaches?
Each coach signs in with their own account and keeps their schedule, their students and their rates there. The coach decides what the club gets to see. Their students are theirs.
Is the address the club's own?
Visits count on the club's address, not in a shared directory. The padelante.app domain is ours, so if the club wants the address to be fully its own, it can point its own domain at the platform.
And if one day we want to leave?
The data belongs to the club and can be exported whenever needed. There is no lock-in.