Utilisation is the single most important operating metric for a padel club. It is the percentage of available court-hours that are actually booked and played across your operating window. A club with four courts open 14 hours a day has 56 court-hours available daily; if 36 are booked, that's a 64% utilisation rate.
How to measure it well
The denominator matters. Some operators measure against "all hours the doors are open"; others only count the hours they consider sellable (for example, 9am–10pm). Both are defensible — what's not defensible is changing the denominator between months, because then the trend line is meaningless. Pick a definition, write it down, and stick to it.
The numerator should count played bookings, not just confirmed bookings. No-shows and last-minute cancellations look like sold time on a booking system but generate no revenue and don't represent real demand for that slot.
What "good" looks like
Healthy clubs in mature markets often see overall utilisation in the 55–75% range, with peak hours close to 100% and weekday mornings well below the average. Clubs above 80% on average usually have a queue management problem, not a utilisation triumph: members can't book peak slots and start to look elsewhere.
Why averages mislead
A single average hides the entire story. The useful view is a heatmap of utilisation by day-of-week and hour-of-day. That makes the off-peak gap visible — which is the part you can actually move.