--- title: "AI Court Booking: Letting ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants Book and Pay for Your Courts | SportyPlus" description: "AI court booking lets a player ask an assistant for a court and pay for it in one conversation. Here is how it works, what a club controls, and what is not ready yet." lang: "cs" canonical: "https://www.sporty.plus/cs/blog/ai-court-booking" --- 1. [Domů](https://www.sporty.plus/cs) 3. [Blog](https://www.sporty.plus/cs/blog) 5. AI Court Booking: Letting ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants Book and Pay for Your Courts ![AI Court Booking: Letting ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants Book and Pay for Your Courts](https://www.sporty.plus/_og/r/blog/ai-court-booking.png) # AI Court Booking: Letting ChatGPT and Other AI Assistants Book and Pay for Your Courts AI court booking lets a player ask an assistant for a court and pay for it in one conversation. Here is how it works, what a club controls, and what is not ready yet. **AI court booking** means a player asks an AI assistant, something like _"find me a padel court near me on Saturday at 5 for 90 minutes"_, and the assistant finds a free court, tells them the price, and books and pays for it, without the player opening the club's website. For that to work, the assistant needs three things from the club: a way to see which courts are free and what they cost, a way to put a booking through, and a way to pay that the club actually receives. This guide explains how that works, what a club should insist on, and what is honestly not ready yet. ## Why this matters to a club Players already search for courts the way they search for restaurants: on their phone, in a hurry, often for a club they have never visited. More of that searching now starts in an AI assistant instead of a search engine. An assistant can only offer what it can reach. If your availability sits behind a phone number, a WhatsApp group or a booking page it cannot read, it cannot book you. It may not mention you at all. The club down the road whose courts it _can_ book gets the reservation. This is the same shift that happened when clubs moved from a paper diary to [online court booking](https://www.sporty.plus/blog/five-signs-your-club-needs-online-court-booking). The customer changes where they start, and the club has to be reachable from there. ## How clubs handle it today Mostly, they don't, and that's reasonable. Today an assistant asked for a court will usually: - search the web and list clubs, with a link to each club's own booking page; - sometimes read opening hours or prices from the club's site, which may be out of date; - hand the player back to a website or a phone number to actually book. The player then has to create an account, find the right court and time again, and pay. A lot of them drop off somewhere along the way. ## What an AI assistant needs to book a court properly Two open standards cover the pieces: - **The Model Context Protocol (MCP)** lets an assistant use a service's tools directly: in this case "find clubs", "show free courts and prices", "book". - **The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)**, published by OpenAI and Stripe, describes how an agent opens a checkout with a seller, shows the buyer the total, and pays with a payment token the buyer approved. The seller charges it like any other card payment. Behind those protocols, a club should expect a few things from any system that lets agents book its courts: 1. **The club's rules still apply.** Opening hours, member prices, how far ahead people may book, how many bookings they may hold. An agent booking a court should be held to exactly the same rules as a player booking on the website. 2. **Nothing is held until it is paid.** Assistants browse; they compare several options before the player decides. A court should not disappear from your calendar because an assistant _looked_ at it. 3. **The money goes to the club.** The charge should land in the club's own payment account, with the club as the seller, not with a middleman who pays out later. 4. **Tax is right.** In the US that usually means sales tax added on top of the court price. In Europe it means VAT already included in it. 5. **Cancelling works the way players expect.** A player who paid by card through an assistant expects the refund on that card. 6. **The club decides who may sell its time.** Switching this on should be a choice, club by club and assistant by assistant. ## Example: a Saturday pickleball booking Take a hypothetical pickleball club in New York with 6 courts, open 8:00 to 22:00, charging $40 an hour to non-members, with 8.875% sales tax. A visitor asks an assistant for a court on Saturday afternoon. The assistant: 1. finds the club and asks for Saturday's free slots, and gets back, say, a 90-minute slot on Court 2 at 13:00 for **$60.00 + $5.33 sales tax = $65.33**; 2. opens a checkout for that slot. The club's calendar is unchanged; 3. asks the visitor for their name and email, and shows them the total and the club's terms; 4. once the visitor agrees, sends the payment token. At that moment the booking is made, the price is checked again, the card is charged $65.33 on the club's own Stripe account and the booking is confirmed. If someone else took Court 2 at 13:00 in the meantime, the visitor is told the slot has gone and is charged nothing. The visitor gets a confirmation and an email saying an account was made for them at the club, with a link to choose a password so they can manage the booking themselves. If they cancel within the club's cancellation window, the $65.33 goes back to their card. A member of the same club who connects the assistant to their club account would see their member price instead, because it is their membership that decides the price. ## How SportyPlus can help SportyPlus clubs can now sell court time through AI assistants. It works through both standards above: an MCP server that assistants can connect to, and an ACP checkout for agents that speak that protocol. Both run the same [court booking](https://www.sporty.plus/modules/court_booking) rules the club already uses, so there is nothing separate to configure or keep in sync. The six points above are how it behaves. Opening a checkout only prices the slot; the court is booked the moment it is paid, on the club's own Stripe account through [SportyPlus payments](https://www.sporty.plus/modules/finance), and cancelled bookings refund to the card. Signed-in members pay their membership price; a newcomer pays the non-member price and gets an account when they pay. A US club adds its sales-tax rate on top. It is switched on club by club, and each club chooses which assistant platforms may sell its courts to newcomers. Developers building an assistant can find the technical details in the [agent checkout documentation](https://docs.sporty.plus/oauth/agent-checkout). ## What is not ready yet It is worth being straight about where this stands, because the technology is moving fast and a lot of what is written about it is ahead of reality. - **The big consumer assistants are not selling court bookings yet.** The in-chat checkout OpenAI launched for ChatGPT in 2025 was scaled back in early 2026, and the checkout that remains there is aimed at physical goods. Whether a player can book your courts from a particular assistant depends on that assistant supporting in-chat payment for services. Being ready means your club is bookable the day one does. - **The standards were written for shopping, not for time slots.** ACP has no built-in idea of "Saturday, 13:00, 90 minutes" yet, so each court slot is sent as an item of its own. That works, but expect the standard to change. - **Some cards will not go through.** A card that asks for an extra bank check (3-D Secure) cannot be approved inside an assistant yet. The player is asked for another card. - **Doubles are booked by one person.** The buyer books and pays for the whole court; partners can be added in the app afterwards. ## Practical recommendations - **Get your online booking right first.** An assistant can only book what your system knows: accurate opening hours, real prices, and rules that are enforced, not just written down. If that is not in place, start with the [complete guide to court booking management](https://www.sporty.plus/blog/court-booking-management). - **Set a clear cancellation policy** and show it before payment. Players booking through an assistant will read it there, not on your noticeboard. - **Check your sales tax setting.** A US club should confirm the rate that applies to court rentals at its address with its accountant, and enter that. - **Decide your newcomer price.** Assistants mostly bring people who are not members yet. Make sure your non-member rate is one you are happy to sell at. - **Start with one club or a few courts** if you run several sites, and see who books that way before switching everywhere on. ## Related questions **Does the club pay a commission to the AI assistant?** That depends on the assistant platform's own terms, which are still being set. The payment itself is made on the club's Stripe account like any other online booking. **Can an assistant book a court for someone who already has an account?** Yes, if the player connects the assistant to their account first, and then they pay their member price. If an assistant tries to book a newcomer using an email that already has an account, the booking is refused until the player signs in. That stops anyone from putting bookings on someone else's account. **Will AI bookings clash with bookings from our website or app?** No. They go into the same calendar and are checked against it at the moment of payment, so two people cannot end up with the same court. **What happens to the booking if the assistant loses the connection halfway?** Nothing is charged until the checkout is completed, and a repeated request is recognised as the same one, so a retry does not charge the player twice. --- **Make your courts bookable wherever players look for them.** SportyPlus runs your [court booking](https://www.sporty.plus/modules/court_booking) and [payments](https://www.sporty.plus/modules/finance) on your rules, on your website, in the member app, and now through AI assistants. ## Související průvodce SportyPlus - [How to Manage Court Bookings Without Spreadsheets, Messages and Manual Work](https://www.sporty.plus/cs/blog/court-booking-management) A complete guide to replacing spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and manual scheduling with booking rules the system enforces on its own. - [Five signs your club needs online court booking](https://www.sporty.plus/cs/blog/five-signs-your-club-needs-online-court-booking) Five warning signs that phone-and-notebook court booking is costing your club time and money. - [How to Handle Refunds for Cancelled Court Bookings Automatically](https://www.sporty.plus/cs/blog/automatic-refunds-court-bookings) A clear cancellation rule plus an automatic club wallet credit removes one repetitive task from every cancellation.