How Blue Coast cut admin time and increased online bookings after switching to Swellbase

Disclosure: Blue Coast is owned by Swellbase founder Adam El, and was Swellbase's first customer. Many of Swellbase’s features were originally developed to solve specific problems for Blue Coast, and as a result switching has had a significant impact on the business.

Blue Coast is an AALA-licensed multi-activity outdoor centre & surf school based in Cullen Bay on the Moray Firth Coast in northeast Scotland. It offers surf lessons, coasteering adventures, paddleboarding, kids camps, equipment hire and equipment sales across two locations using a fixed shack at Cullen Beach and a mobile trailer at Portknockie Harbour.

The centre operates from April through October with a team of ~9 contracted part-time and full time staff supported by freelancers and casual contracted staff.

Blue Coast had been using FareHarbor for 4 years before switching to Swellbase, and had run into a number of specific limitations and complexities which were creating obstacles to daily operations and business growth.

The Challenge

Operating a growing owner-operator centre, Blue Coast faced a number of challenges that weren’t solved well by its previous booking software:

Waivers weren't integrated. The previous booking software didn't handle waivers, so the team was using website forms as waivers and linking them to bookings via a paid third-party automation tool.
Staff & freelancer scheduling lived outside the system. The previous system didn't deal with staff availability or assignment, so the owner managed it across Google Calendar and WhatsApp chats.
Inflexible staff resource management. When additional freelance or casual instructors were available, the previous system made it difficult to increase capacity and treated staff as shared equipment instead of individual instructors. This resulted in a lose-lose choice: deal with last minute overbooking headaches or close sessions conservatively and leave bookings on the table.
Admin couldn't be delegated. Because so much operational info lived across disconnected tools without controlled access, the admin jobs couldn't be shared appropriately across the team. Third-party automation was flaky, technical, and a large time burden, the last thing Blue Coast needed in the middle of summer!

The complexity and limitations of their previous booking system for outdoor centre use meant the owner avoided adding access for the team and became the bottleneck for all operational information. Attempts to solve this were time-consuming and unreliable, often creating a further admin burden.

The Solution

It saves me hours every week. I login, allocate instructors, check bookings, and close and open timeslots quickly and easily.

Everything is easy to understand, where you’d expect it to be, and just makes sense. Much better than the other systems I’ve used before!

—Toby Bennett (Senior Instructor at Blue Coast)

Blue Coast switched to Swellbase at the start of 2026, and immediately saw significant advantages:

Admin

Integrated waivers with question flags. Swellbase digital waivers attach directly to bookings. Blue Coast uses templates for different activities and groups, and collects signatures and important information either per booking or per participant. Answer flags ensure the instructors see the waivers they need to investigate at a glance and everyone has the info they need to deliver a great and safe experience to customers.
Team management. Instructors and guides add their own availability and qualifications in the system and see all the information they need to see for the sessions they are assigned to.
Qualification-based capacity, with flexibility. Staff sign-offs gate which sessions they can run, but a freelancer can be added in and made bookable in minutes when they offer up a day.
Easy to use. The entire team has access to Swellbase. Information goes where it needs to go without bottlenecks that were micro-managed on WhatsApp previously.

Growth

Multi-session surf lesson sales & private bookings. Customers can book a course of lessons easily in one booking flow, and can one click upgrade to private lessons. This avoids repeated journeys through the booking journey for a common customer need.
Gift Vouchers sold by experience. Customers choose either a monetary amount or a specific activity to gift, and see the same upsells and options they would see if going through the normal booking flow. Customers want to gift experiences, not arbitrary amounts!
One glance business health check. The Swellbase dashboard provides an instant overview of key metrics, so the owner can see at a glance Blue Coast’s performance compared to previous seasons, and its revenue earned based on sessions delivered to understand monthly profitability instantly.

The Results

What did surprise me was the revenue increase we saw in our first month after the switch. Some of this is seasonal variation, but we also experienced a significant sales uptick across surf lesson packages, private bookings and gift vouchers because in Swellbase this is made easy for customers when booking.

With FareHarbor, we had to request complicated workarounds that took the customer out of the natural booking flow just to make the same basic offers. With Swellbase it’s easy to set up, easy for the customer to use, and just makes sense around the experiences we offer.

The impact has been significant and immediate. By switching to a system purpose-built for outdoor centres, Blue Coast has experienced:

40.6% increase in online booking revenue for Blue Coast for April 2026 versus the same period the previous year. Set against a smaller 23% increase in the number of bookings, Blue Coast saw an increased per-order value largely due to Swellbase features.
6.5 hours per week reduction in manager admin time due to team members having access to everything they need through Swellbase. What took a full day’s admin before now takes around an hour!

Testimonial

We already knew we would cut down our admin time when making the switch. Swellbase is designed specifically for our workflows so there’s no more faff scheduling staff and dealing with waivers on separate systems, keeping track of qualifications on spreadsheets, and verifying everything by WhatsApp.

The whole team have their own accounts on our dashboard and they’ve all picked it up straight away - they add their availability and qualifications and check info themselves. That alone has saved so much admin time and has made it much easier for a manager to step in and run the day to day without relying on me.

Swellbase is the system I wish we had when we opened.

—Adam El (Director at Blue Coast)

Ready to see what Swellbase could do for your centre?

Join surf schools and outdoor centres like Blue Coast already using Swellbase to manage their operations. Click here to book a demo with the team today.