Capture sunbed bookings online and fill your beach bar before you open

Nearly two out of three Spaniards —63%— have already booked some kind of tourist experience online: a day trip, a ticket, a guided tour. So says a 2024 YouGov survey. And a day on a front-row sunbed, with the parasol and the spot held for the whole day, is exactly that: one more experience people are glad to have locked in ahead of time.

So the question isn't whether your customers book online —they do—, it's whether they find you when they do. Someone planning their beach day the night before, from the couch with their phone, wants to lock in the spot before packing the cooler and driving half an hour. If they can book with you, tomorrow is yours; if not, the place next door takes them and you never even know. And working only with whoever shows up at the door, you miss out on that decision every single night.

The ceiling on relying on passing trade

Walk-in trade has one thing going for it: it's easy, you set nothing up. And one thing against it: it ties you to the luck of the day. If the wind picks up, if some other event draws the crowds away, if that weekend they head for a different cove, your capacity sits half-empty and that day is gone for good.

Capturing bookings in advance flips it around: instead of waiting to see who turns up, you reach the person who's deciding. The spots you sell the night before are revenue you already have when you open up, rain or shine.

Your own booking page, no middlemen

The basics are simple: a booking form that's yours. You put it on your website —it drops in with a couple of lines— and your customers pick a date, a zone and a sunbed and confirm on their own, without calling you or waiting for you to open.

It's not the shop window of some portal where you show up among a hundred other beach bars: it's your page, with your zones, your prices and your way of working. The booking goes straight into your system and shows up on the day's map, without anyone keying it in.

A link of your own for each zone, ready for a QR code

Besides the form on your website, each zone has its own link —short and readable, with the name of your business and the zone—, none of those odd codes or addresses impossible to read out. It works for everything: you drop it on your Instagram, your Google listing or a WhatsApp message, and whoever clicks lands right on the booking page for that zone.

And since it's a perfectly ordinary link, you turn it into a QR code in a minute and plant it where people already are: on the parasol, on the board at the entrance, on the bar menu, on the sign along the promenade. Someone walking by who has no spot today scans it and books for tomorrow, instead of wandering off and forgetting you. It stops being a sale-or-nothing: it becomes a future booking.

Every booking is yours in full, no commissions

Here's the difference you feel most at the end of the month. Booking portals bring you customers, sure, but they take a cut on every head: a percentage out of your pocket booking after booking, including from the customer who'd have come anyway.

With your own booking form there's no middleman charging a toll. You pay your service fee and that's it: booking number ten and booking number a thousand cost the same in commissions —that is, nothing. The better your season goes, the bigger that difference grows against relying on a portal.

From booking to check-in, no paperwork

Capturing the booking is the start; making arrival easy is what leaves a good taste. A booking made online drops straight onto your day's map, with no one copying it by hand. When the customer arrives, you check them in with one tap from the map itself; and if you have QR check-in switched on, you just scan the code they got when they booked.

Either way, the customer booked from home, you were already counting on that income, and seating them when they show up is a matter of a single gesture.

Fill up before you open

Relying on the promenade alone is letting the day decide for you. Giving people an easy way to book with you —from your website, from a QR code on the parasol, from your Instagram— is starting the day with part of your capacity already sold, and without paying a commission for it.

You don't have to choose between walk-in and online bookings: your regulars still come in through the door, and on top of that you add everyone who decides the night before. See how the booking and payment methods fit together and, once they start coming in, how to balance the till without fuss at closing. Take a look at the plans and at what Reserva de Hamacas does for your beach bar: the best sunbed is the one already booked before you open.