How Fistral Beach Surf School cut two systems down to one and grew online booking share from 30% to 55%

Fistral Beach Surf School is based right on Fistral Beach in Newquay, Cornwall. It is one of the busiest surf schools and hire operations in the UK - 210+ beginner boards out on a peak weekend.

It also offers lessons and hires from a second location at Tolcarne Beach, and resells coasteering through a long-running partnership with Bare Feet Coasteer (who are also running their business on Swellbase).

The team grows with the season: 3 people in the shop in the shoulder months, 5 or 6 through the summer, supported by a team of ~20 self-employed instructors whose availability moves week to week.

Fistral had been using Checkfront for 5 years before switching to Swellbase — plus a second system, Connecteam, for the staff rota. The two didn't talk to each other, creating a large admin burden that made things difficult year-round for the team running ops in the shop.

The Challenge

Operating one of the busiest surf centres in the UK, Fistral faced a huge admin burden matching freelance staff availability to their publicly bookable timeslots.

In the 5 years they used Checkfront they asked for a solution to this problem without joy, ultimately resorting to an additional $59 per month subscription to Connecteam to try and solve it, which created its own additional admin issues.

The rota was a second system, kept in sync by hand. Every lesson opened in Checkfront had to be recreated in Connecteam as a provisional shift, assigned to a coach, then confirmed once the lesson actually booked. Building those TBC shifts for a season that hadn't happened yet was a winter job.
Two systems meant two chances to get it wrong. Cross-checking the rota against the bookings took two, three, sometimes four people. Human error was a running cost that the systems did nothing to alleviate.
A booking flow that pushed customers to the phone. Work that should have arrived as a completed booking arrived instead as an enquiry to answer, as customers resorted to phone and email to avoid a clunky booking experience. This had a real cost - answering an enquiry takes ten minutes of someone's day.
Multi-lesson discounts couldn't be automated. Checkfront only handled group-size discounts, so the multi-lesson price advertised on the board in the shop couldn't be matched online. Customers who'd paid full price online then saw the deal at check-in in the shop.

The Solution

I can see it all in one screen. I'm not flicking back and forth between two systems all the time. It's definitely made it a lot more efficient for us.

As soon as we're on in the morning you look at the week view — you can see there's no instructor on a session that's booked, and I can just drag an instructor on. It's as easy as that, and I'm confident it's done and everyone knows what they need to know.

Fistral went live on Swellbase on 11 May 2026, a month before peak season, and about six weeks after telling us what they'd need before they could run the school on it. That list became the build.

Operations

The rota is the booking system. Open the week view, see at a glance which sessions have no instructor on them and which instructors are available, drag someone in. No second system, no reconciliation - Connecteam is gone entirely.
Staff confirm their own assignments. Instructors click a link in their notification email to confirm, and are auto-updated if an assignment is cancelled or a timeslot moves.
Instructor session view with customer details hidden. Coaches see the group, the time and the notes - no personal information, no payment data.
Daily printable manifest. Names, contact, waiver status, assigned instructor, paid-or-pending, booking reference. Printed at the desk before the day starts, the way Fistral already ran mornings.
Per-participant waivers, including minors. Signed against the individual rather than the booking, with flags so the desk sees the ones that need a look.
Hires are hires, not activities. Swellbase gives full flexibility for Fistral’s hire offering across two locations with varying durations throughout the season.
The coasteering partnership runs itself. Bare Feet Coasteer has controlled access to Fistral's coasteering timeslots, so they manage their own availability, capacity and tide-dependent start times directly. Fistral carries none of the admin and keeps the revenue stream.

Bookings

Book Now on the front page, straight through to checkout in a modern booking flow. Fewer clicks between a customer landing on the site and being booked on.
Apple Pay and Google Pay, built in. This was missing from Checkfront and a big motivator for the switch.
Fixed-amount multi-session discounts. Not percentages - Fistral told us percentages didn't work for how they price, so we built it their way. The price on the board in the shop and the price online can now be the same number.
Discount codes. Live in time for half term with Fistral’s partners benefiting from partnership codes.
Payment links. The team can easily collect payments for enquiries without having to chase.

The Results

We've noticed a massive decrease in enquiries and an increase in bookings overall. You can literally go on our front page, there's a button right there, it says Book Now. You click on it, you go straight through, and then you can just do Apple Pay, which is nice and easy.

That saves more time, doesn't it — less responding to enquiries, having to sit down and do the ten-minute email.

55% of bookings now come in online, up from an estimated 30%. Fistral put online bookings at around 30% of the business before the switch. In June — their first full month on Swellbase — 55% came in online, with the rest taken at the desk or over the phone. Fewer enquiries arriving, more bookings arriving overall, and every enquiry that doesn't need answering is ten minutes back.
Hours a week back from the rota grind. Cross-checking a rota system against a booking system is gone, and so is the winter spent building TBC shifts for a season that hadn't happened yet. The errors that came with reconciling two systems by hand are way down.
The time goes back into the shop. Front desk, instructors, hire jobs — the reclaimed hours are spent making the operation better rather than clawing through admin.
Support that works when the surf school does. Checkfront's support was weekday office hours, with responses sometimes taking 4-5 days. Ours comes back within the day, often within the hour — including Saturday and Sunday, which is when a busy surf school actually breaks.
Eighteen days from decision to live, a month before peak season. Fistral gave the go-ahead on 23 April and were trading on Swellbase on 11 May. We moved the setup, the season’s upcoming bookings, waivers and customer records across from Checkfront. Changing booking system is a February job for most operators — Fistral did it weeks out from the busiest trading of their year, and traded through it with no downtime.

Testimonial

Everyone's been getting on really well with the new system and it’s saving us loads of time. It’s been easy to teach all of our staff and they're finding it really good.

We're definitely glad we managed to move over in time for the summer. Everything's working smoothly.

With Checkfront it's always been the same for the last five years — it's never really changed. You've taken in all our feedback and worked with us to provide the exact product we needed, making our lives easier.

—Tom Reed (Manager at Fistral Beach Surf School)

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