Newmarket launching online platform, app to book ice time, meeting rooms

The town will be the first municipality in Canada to offer CatchCorner this spring

Newmarkettoday.ca
March 10, 2021

Starting this spring, Newmarket residents will be able to book and pay online for municipally owned ice pads and meeting spaces for the first time.

The Town Newmarket will be the first municipality in Canada to use CatchCorner, an online platform designed for renting sports facilities launched in 2019 by two Toronto entrepreneurs.

The platform and its associated phone app will allow Newmarket residents to book an hour at one of the Magna Centre's ice pads for a pickup hockey game or rent a room at Ray Twinney Recreation Complex for a birthday party just like they would buy something off Amazon.

Currently, the town website displays available ice times at various rinks, however, you cannot book and pay for them online -- you have to call and talk to a staff member and arrange payment.

Commissioner of community services Ian McDougall said that as e-commerce has become a bigger part of people's lives, their expectations for how well online services should work has grown as well. Bringing CatchCorner to provide an easy, user-friendly way to rent town facilities is a way for meeting those expectations.

"Traditionally, in Newmarket and in the whole (municipal) sector, this is something we have been lagging. So this will take us from a position of being unable to do that to align with the expectations of our customers," McDougall told councillors at their meeting on Monday.

It was not revealed during the council meeting how much the town is expecting to pay for the new booking system. It was confirmed that there will be some impact on the budget, but staff believe it will end up paying for itself through increased space rentals and saving employee time.

"Having customers (call staff directly) causes a bottleneck where they need to talk to staff, staff have to review that request, and then issue a permit, which can get a little convoluted. Having a much faster and efficient process means fewer phone calls to staff, which means they will have more quality time to spend with larger customers or more complicated one-off bookings like weddings," he said.

"I do expect we will be able to match the cost because of the additional bookings," he said.

It was noted that prices for renting ice pads and other facilities will remain the same, with no additional service charges added. People will also still be able to call in and book by phone.

So how does it work?

The creators of CatchCorner gave a live demonstration of Newmarket's new booking platform for council.

Using the website or cellphone app, residents will be able to select ice pads or meeting rooms and see all of the available spaces and times.

A description of each facility is provided, along with a 360-degree picture of the space. An infographic shows all of the available time blocks, while residents can also search for specific times and days.

Once a time has been selected, the user can pay at a checkout screen just like at any other online store, although there are a few extra steps.

The system checks for residency in Newmarket by asking for a postal code. Mayor John Taylor doubted this would be much of an obstacle, but the creators said that other options are available such as scanning a driver's licence.

The platform also asks users to select an insurance level, and it auto-generates a municipal permit that requires a digital signature.

The checkout also allows users to split the cost of the rental with others.

One big change is that there will be no more returns for unwanted bookings. Customers will technically own the time, said Wilson, and the system will allow people to put the time back up for sale on the system instead of getting a refund.

Precautions will be taken to make sure that people can't just buy up time and attempt to resell it for a profit, however.

The system is expected to have a soft launch this spring and be ramped up by the fall.