Every Tuesday, this site examines a training or technology concept that shapes how tennis is played. This week, we are looking at a technology problem that is making it increasingly difficult for some recreational tennis players to get on the court. However, I suspect the technology is getting more of the blame than it deserves.
An article published this week in the Financial Times describes an escalating battle over reservations for London’s approximately 1,400 public tennis courts. Players trying to secure desirable court times are discovering that reservations disappear almost immediately after the booking window opens. The competition is particularly fierce during evenings and weekends, when most working adults are available to play.
Some of that competition is coming from automated booking bots. These applications monitor reservation systems and submit booking requests the moment courts become available. In one test conducted by the Financial Times, a commercial service called Racket Club secured a court within nine seconds of the reservation window opening. The developer explained that his software can submit requests in milliseconds, considerably faster than a human navigating the same website.
Racket Club charges £1 per successful reservation. Other services offer similar capabilities, and some enterprising tennis players have apparently developed their own booking bots. Local authorities are understandably unhappy about this development. Several have prohibited automated reservations, and the operator of the booking platform has increased its efforts to detect and block suspicious activity.
I understand the frustration, but I think the emphasis on bots is obscuring the underlying problem.
First, I want to give London some credit for providing a public court reservation system in the first place. I am a strong advocate for making public tennis courts reservable. Tennis is a sport that generally requires coordinating schedules with at least one other person, and frequently three. Arranging a practice session becomes considerably more complicated when nobody knows whether a court will be available when everyone arrives. A reservation system makes better use of the courts and allows players to plan their tennis around the rest of their lives.
The system described in the article sounds excellent in principle. It allows players to reserve public facilities online, know when they will have access, and organize their tennis accordingly. However, technology cannot create more capacity when people want more court time than what is available.
I have some personal experience with this particular problem. A couple of years ago, I was attending a tennis event when another player asked whether I could help her reserve courts for lessons the following week. The courts belonged to a homeowners association, and the reservation window opened the next morning while she would be playing a match.
When the booking window opened, I was online and ready to go. She needed two time slots, but I only managed to secure one of them. The other disappeared before I could complete the reservation.
I was doing exactly what the London players are doing, competing to submit a reservation faster than everyone else who wanted the same court. I just happened to be doing it manually. Had I been using a bot, I suspect I would have had a better chance of securing both reservations.
That experience makes it difficult for me to condemn the people using these services. The player I was helping had a perfectly legitimate reason for wanting someone else to make her reservations. I was available when she wasn’t, so I acted on her behalf. A booking bot performs essentially the same function, except that it doesn’t have to rely on human reaction time or the speed of someone’s mouse clicks.
The commercial services introduce another dimension that I find considerably less appealing. There is something vaguely reminiscent of the mafia about a third party charging people for preferential access to a public resource it neither owns nor operates. The courts are provided for public use, yet someone has found a way to collect a fee for improving a player’s chances of getting onto one.
I find that objectionable in principle. I also know that if I regularly struggled to reserve courts, I would cheerfully pay the £1.
That contradiction says quite a bit about the incentives created by the reservation system. The bot developers have identified a problem that people are willing to pay to solve. Players who use the services gain an advantage, which makes the services more attractive to everyone else. Eventually, even people who would prefer to book courts themselves may feel compelled to use automation simply to compete with those who already do.
The obvious response is to prohibit bots and implement technical measures to prevent them from accessing the reservation system. London authorities are already attempting exactly that. Unfortunately, it is hard to do in reality. Automated clients can imitate legitimate users, distribute their requests across different accounts and networks, and adapt when detection mechanisms change. The people developing these tools have a financial incentive to keep them working.
There are ways to make life more difficult for the bot operators, including limiting reservations and requiring players to verify their identities. A lottery might also be worth consideration, since that would eliminate the advantage of submitting a reservation faster than everyone else. Of course, that assumes each person gets only one entry. Otherwise, the bot developers would simply turn their attention to finding ways to stuff the ballot box.
All of those approaches involve tradeoffs, and none changes the number of courts available.
That is the part of the Financial Times article I found most interesting. According to Sport England, the number of adults playing tennis at least twice a month has increased approximately 40 percent since before the pandemic. At six of London’s busiest public tennis venues, roughly 94 percent of peak-time court hours were booked between July and September.
London has a court availability problem that has nothing to do with booking bots. With that many people competing for prime time slots, someone is inevitably going to be disappointed. Getting rid of the bots might give everyone a more equal chance of securing a reservation, but it wouldn’t do anything about the number of courts available.
There is also the question of when those courts are available. Having plenty of empty courts at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday doesn’t help someone who works during the day and wants to play at 6 p.m. Increasing capacity may require building more courts, but extending operating hours, adding lights, or making better use of existing facilities could help accommodate some of that demand.
I also find it interesting that the developer of one of the bots reportedly suggested that the people creating booking bots might eventually sell local administrations the technology needed to deal with them. There is a certain entrepreneurial elegance to creating a service that exploits a problem and then offering to sell someone a solution to the resulting problem.
The London authorities have a legitimate interest in ensuring that access to public tennis facilities is distributed fairly. They should certainly consider whether their reservation policies are producing the outcomes they want. However, I suspect they could spend a great deal of money fighting booking bots without making it appreciably easier for residents to find an available court.
The bots are exploiting scarcity, not creating it. Until there is enough court capacity to meet demand, players will continue competing for reservations, and someone will continue looking for a technological advantage in that competition.
The most effective long-term investment probably isn’t another layer of bot detection. It’s more places to play tennis.
- London’s tennis players cry fault as bots snap up court bookings, Mari Novak and Jason Ma, Financial Times, October 23, 2026.
