How Bare Feet Coasteer ran its busiest season in 3 years without getting out of the water

Bare Feet Coasteer was set up in 2012, running coasteering out of Newquay, Cornwall. Sessions launch from Fistral Beach on the routes around Towan Head — a coastline where the start time is set by the size of the tide rather than by the diary.

The season runs on a large freelance guide pool of around ~16, whose availability moves week to week. Bare Feet also sells through a long-running partnership with Fistral Beach Surf School, who resell coasteering from the shop on the beach.

Owner Nick Webb is in the water for most of it. That's the constraint everything else has to answer to:

I don't actually run my business — I'm in the water delivering it. I need something that's going to run smoothly while I'm in the water.

Bare Feet ran on Beyonk before Swellbase. The go-ahead to switch came on 30 April 2026 and the business was trading on Swellbase on 8 May — eight days later, weeks out from the busiest trading of the year.

The Challenge

Our system used to infuriate people because it was all over the shop. I went through the booking process on the phone before switching and couldn’t believe how cumbersome and unclear the process was.

• A booking flow customers had to fight. Pay-per-click ads and a website were feeding customers into that process and losing them at the point they'd made their minds up — people were finding Bare Feet and then not making it through to a booking.
• Guides could only be scheduled against confirmed individual bookings, not sessions. Backwards for a business running on freelance guides that get booked up elsewhere if you wait. Staffing ran on WhatsApp group chats with no central view of who was free, plus an Excel sheet that gave guides a list of bookings.
• Changing session times was confusing and inflexible. Scheduling ran on a fixed pattern schedule and it was difficult to make ad-hoc adjustments as needed.
• Fixes that came from the wrong industry. Support was responsive, but it was coming from “a background of steam railways and vintage car museums”. Answers arrived as cobbled-together versions of something built for a different kind of business, because nobody at the other end had run a tide-dependent operation in the outdoors.

The Solution

Today we'd booked a session out. I found a guide free to put another session on, assigned them the session, and opened it up for bookings so customers arriving in Newquay right now can book. And I'll do all that sitting having lunch with my wife, on my phone. How easy is that?

Guides and scheduling

• Guides go on timeslots, not individual bookings. Guides add their availability to the system, and Nick can schedule them in advance so they’re booked in for the coming demand in busy season.
• Guides accept or decline, rather than being told. With a freelance pool sessions had to be offered rather than assigned, before the guides got booked up elsewhere. Easy drag-and-drop assignment for Nick with one-click acceptance or decline for the guides.
• A guide-only view with everything they need on it. Guides are getting to venue before Nick does, knowing exactly who is coming, how much kit to get ready, and which names to check off as people arrive.

Sessions and customers

• Move a start time for the tide, in seconds. Sessions get rescheduled, closed and added all season as conditions change. Bare Feet make the changes themselves easily, from wherever they are, with complete flexibility.
• Everyone booked on gets told automatically. When a timeslot moves, Swellbase asks whether to email the customers on it — and does it in one click. Bare Feet still phone round first — that's how they work — but the follow-up that used to mean redoing everything by hand is now one action.

The Fistral partnership

• Bare Feet runs Fistral's coasteering diary from inside Fistral's Swellbase account. We created a dedicated Coasteer role on their dashboard, so Bare Feet can set the capacity and move sessions around the spring tides. Fistral carry none of the admin and keep the revenue stream. Win win.

The Results

It's not about time to me — I've only got the time I've got. I’m in the water all the time so the system has to work for me, and I’m just not stressing about it anymore. That's the most important thing. I can't put a value on that.

• £1,300 through the system on the first weekend. Bare Feet went live on Friday. By Sunday night Nick was emailing about a £1,300 sales day from the public booking flow — "what a start to our new working relationship."
• The busiest season in three years. May is normally a strong month for Bare Feet and had been quiet two years running. This year it wasn't. June ran busy almost every day, and July — a month that usually starts slow — went through with full sessions. Bare Feet put it down to being in a position to make the most of the demand. People find Bare Feet through the website and the ads, and this year they make it through to a booking instead of getting caught in the checkout.
• Sixteen guides running themselves. Every guide has a login, confirms their own sessions, and sees what they need to see and nothing else. The WhatsApp scramble and the emailed spreadsheet are gone, and a new guide six weeks in is arriving at venue with everything they need to know, before the owner gets there.
• The tide stopped being an admin problem. Sessions move with complete flexibility, everyone booked on knows about it, and nobody is losing days to a booking calendar that closed itself without telling them.
• A partnership worth protecting got easier. Bare Feet had spent a couple of years building the Fistral relationship, and the scheduling mismatch was a genuine risk to it. Fistral's coasteering now runs flexibly on Bare Feet's times with zero admin for Fistral. A marked improvement on a previously manual process with rigid start times.
• Support from inside the industry. The difference isn't response time, it's where the answer starts from — someone who already understands the problem. Fixes come from people who have run the same sessions, rather than another iteration of something built for a museum.

Testimonial

It's all working for me rather than against me. That's where I was before — the whole thing wasn't actually helping me at all. It was just stressing me out and causing me more work.

Swellbase has obviously been put together by people who are used to sitting with my pressures, in my situation.

Business-wise, best thing I've ever done.

—Nick Webb (Owner at Bare Feet Coasteer)

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