Audience: Riding school owners and organisation admins
Overview
Facility hire lets you rent out your arenas, round yards and other facilities by the hour, half day or full day — to your own clients from the appointment book, or to the public through your club site. This guide covers the three places you'll work with:
| Task | Where |
|---|---|
| Set when each facility is available and what it costs | Organiser → Riding School → Facilities |
| Book a facility for a client yourself | Organiser → Riding School → Bookings → New Booking → Facility Hire |
| Let the public book online | The Facility hire option on your club site's Book Now page (or the Facility hire category on Book Now) |
Requires: a Riding School or Instructor subscription, a venue you administer, and at least one facility on that venue marked Bookable.
Before you start: your venue needs bookable facilities
Facilities belong to a venue, not directly to your organisation. If you open the Facilities page and see No Venue Access, you are not yet an administrator of a venue — use Search for Venue to request management of an existing venue (a Horsify administrator approves the request) or Create New Venue.
If you see No bookable facilities, your venue has no facilities with the Bookable box ticked. Follow the Edit this venue link, add or edit each facility (type, name, description) and tick Bookable. Only active, bookable facilities appear on the Facilities page and in online booking. See Venue Facilities for the full facility fields.
The Facilities page
Organiser → Riding School → Facilities. If you administer more than one organisation, pick it from Select Organisation; if the organisation manages more than one venue, pick the venue from Select Venue.
Each bookable facility gets its own panel with three tabs.
Availability Settings
This is the facility's own timetable — separate from your organisation's Booking Hours and from any instructor's availability. A facility with no availability rules offers no online slots at all.
- Weekly Hours — adds a recurring window for one day of the week (Day of Week, Start Time, End Time; the form starts at 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM). Add one row per day you hire the facility out; add a second row on the same day for split hours.
- Block Out — blocks a specific Date between a Start Time and End Time, with an optional Reason for Block (for example Maintenance, Private Event). Blocked periods show as unavailable in the hourly booking grid, with the reason.
- Saved rules are listed under Weekly Schedule and Blocked Dates; use the bin icon to remove one. Rules can't be edited in place — delete and re-add.
Note on partial-day blocks: for hourly booking, a date-specific block takes over the whole day — the day's weekly hours are set aside, so no hourly slots are offered for the rest of that day either. Treat Block Out as "close this facility on this date". If you only need part of a day closed, keep the day open and take those hours out of play by creating a booking for them yourself instead. Half-day and full-day searches do not currently take Block Out rules into account — a blocked date can still be offered as a half- or full-day slot — so for those, an organiser-created booking over the closed period is the reliable way to remove it.
Rate Cards
Rate cards set the price. A facility with no active rate card cannot be booked online — the public booking page will show no availability for it.
Click Add Rate Card:
- Name — e.g. Standard Rates, Peak Season, Off-Peak.
- Pricing — Hourly Rate (required), Half Day (4hrs) and Full Day (8hrs) (both optional). If you leave the half-day or full-day rate blank, that hire duration is unavailable for the facility.
- Priority — when more than one card could apply, the higher priority wins.
- Applicable Conditions (Optional) — restrict the card to particular Days of Week ("Leave unselected for all days"), a Start Time / End Time window, or a Season Start Date / Season End Date.
Cards can be edited or deleted from the list; inactive cards are labelled Inactive.
Booking Calendar
A day/week/month calendar of this facility's bookings, colour-coded Confirmed, Pending, Completed and Cancelled, with a refresh button. It is read-only — open a booking from Organiser → Riding School → Bookings to change it.
Booking a facility for a client (organiser)
- Go to Organiser → Riding School → Bookings and click New Booking, then choose Facility Hire ("Book arena or facilities").
- Client — pick an existing client, or use the + beside the field to add a new one (Name required; Email and Phone optional — an email lets Horsify send booking notifications, and a new client with an email is invited to create a Horsify account).
- Choose the Venue, then the Facility (each shows its type and hourly rate).
- Hire Duration — Hourly, Half Day or Full Day. Half Day and Full Day are greyed out unless the facility's rate card has a rate for them.
- Pick a date, then click the Available Time Slots you want (30-minute blocks; slots must be adjacent), and press Confirm Selection. Booked slots show the client's name; blocked slots show the reason.
- Add any Booking Notes (Optional).
- Tick Generate Payment Link to email the client a secure Stripe payment link so they can pay by card online. Leave it unticked to collect payment yourself.
- Save. The price is worked out from the facility's rate card and the hire duration.
Horsify checks the duration against the rate you chose: hourly hires must be under 4 hours, half day 4 to just under 8 hours, and full day 8 hours or more. Adjust the slots or the duration if you see a message about this.
The booking then appears in the appointment book and on the facility's Booking Calendar, and can be edited from Organiser → Riding School → Bookings (the edit form opens the same facility hire screen).
Public online facility booking
Clients reach facility booking from your club site's Book Now page under Facility hire ("Choose a facility to hire"), or directly from the Book Our Facilities page, which lists every bookable facility with a View Availability button. Facilities are shown for every venue your organisation owns; a facility only appears if it is active and bookable, and it only shows availability once it has both availability rules and an active rate card.
The booking page for a facility (Book [facility name]) is a three-step wizard: Duration → Date & time → Your details.
Step 1 · Choose a hire duration
Hourly, Half Day or Full Day, each showing the price from the rate card.
Step 2 · Select date & time
Hourly — pick a Date (today or later), then click one or more 30-minute slots. The legend shows Available (green), Selected (blue) and Booked (red); blocked-out periods are also shown as unavailable. Hourly bookings can total up to 4 hours; for longer, choose Half Day or Full Day.
Half Day / Full Day — Horsify searches ahead and shows the next 6 available slots, so the client can see at a glance when the facility is free:
- A full day slot is 8 hours starting at the facility's opening time for that day, and is only offered on days the facility is open for at least 8 hours.
- Half day slots are 4 hours: a Morning slot from opening time and, if the facility is open 8 hours or more, an Afternoon slot straight after it. Slots are labelled by date, e.g. Sat, 21 Mar - Morning.
- Only free slots are shown — anything overlapping an existing booking is skipped.
- Use Search from Date (optional) and Search to look further ahead: Horsify shows the next 6 available slots from that date. Leave the date blank to search from today. The search looks up to 90 days ahead of the chosen date, so try a later start date to see beyond that.
The client selects one slot.
Step 3 · Your details
Contact Information — First Name, Last Name, Email and Phone. Signed-in clients see their verified details pre-filled and locked ("To update your contact details, visit your profile page"); guests can type them in. Then Notes (Optional), and Add to Cart.
Cart and confirmation
Facility hire goes through your club site's cart and checkout like any other booking. If the client pays online, the booking is created as Pending and confirms once payment is complete; a facility-only hire paid by another method you accept (for example bank transfer) is confirmed straight away. Either way the client receives a confirmation email, and the booking appears in your appointment book and the facility's Booking Calendar. If someone else takes the same slot while the client is choosing, they'll see "This time slot was just booked by another user" and the available times refresh.
Troubleshooting
"The facility doesn't appear on the public booking page." Check the facility is Active and Bookable on the venue (see Venue Facilities), and that it has at least one Weekly Hours rule and an active Rate Card.
"Half Day / Full Day is greyed out." The facility's rate card has no half-day or full-day rate. Edit the rate card and fill in the missing rate.
"No half-day or full-day slots come up, but hourly works." A full-day slot needs the facility open for 8 continuous hours from its opening time; a half-day slot needs 4. Check the Weekly Hours windows for those days.
"I blocked out a couple of hours and now the whole day shows no hourly slots." A date-specific block replaces that day's weekly hours for hourly online booking. See the note under Availability Settings.
"The client can't find a date a couple of months away." Half-day and full-day searches show 6 slots at a time and look up to 90 days ahead of the chosen start date. Ask them to enter a later Search from Date and press Search.
Related Features
- Riding School Management — the full Riding School feature set
- Venue Facilities — adding facilities to a venue and marking them bookable
- Setting Your Riding School Booking Hours — why facility hours, instructor availability and booking hours are three separate schedules\n\n---\n\nSource:
wiki/features/FACILITIES_AND_HIRE.md\nLast synced: 2026-09-07 11:48:57 UTC