How Online Booking Helps Swim Smooth Get People Back in the Pool

As fitness businesses reopen around the world, capacity management has become a buzzword. It’s one thing to space fitness equipment or class attendees six feet apart, but what do you do when you have to manage pool workouts?

Paul Newsome, founder of Swim Smooth in Perth, Western Australia, knew what to do: Use technology like Mindbody.

A 300-person waitlist

Swim Smooth is both a coaching program utilized by British Triathlon and the International Triathlon Union and a local swim squad based in Perth. “We promote how to swim better and more efficiently,” Newsome explained.

In 2015, after ten years in business, Newsome realized that something had to give in managing the Swim Smooth squad—the program had a 340-person waitlist to get into the program and manually managed everything.

“When somebody said to me, ‘Hey, can I join the squad?’, I would say you can go on the waitlist,” Newsome said. “But the reality was that the waitlist got bigger and bigger.”

So, he sought out a better solution.

During his search, someone mentioned looking into the software that F45 used since it seemed to do everything Newsome needed. He looked into it, and after seeing that they used Mindbody, he knew he had found his solution.

“It looked like it was going to be a great program for me,” Newsome said.

And it was—since using Mindbody, Swim Smooth has grown from an annual attendance of 13,200 to over 18,000, a 36% increase. The waitlist system was gone—now members could put themselves on waitlists for swim sessions on their mobile phones instead of waiting with hundreds of other aspiring swimmers.

Capacity management and contact tracing through software

Newsome’s diligence became a lifeline when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Mindbody allowed him to manage capacity following Australia’s restrictions on swimmers, and he could immediately contact swimmers should a member of the squad contract the coronavirus.

But Newsome realized that the stakes were higher—every pool would need to manage capacity if they wanted to reopen, but it wasn’t common to even require prebooking before the pandemic.

So, he decided to do something about it—and created a video to teach other swim coaches, pool managers, and health club owners, how to manage capacity with Mindbody technology.