To get the absolute rage at the local leisure centre

Is it the Activ site? Ive just recently started using the leisure centre and the faff of booking for me and DC is infuriating

Argh same - Southwark council has just taken services back in house, and my god the booking system is shit compared to the previous, private system.

As well as all the stuff d one else has mentioned, when they first switched, the new swimming lesson system kept on re-setting to the first lesson ever booked. Which meant my 7 year old kept getting booted out of his swimming lesson and put back into the Mum and Babies class we had been to in 2017.

Each week I’d go to reception and they’d sort it, and the following week it would have happened again. Went on for 3 months. Luckily his teacher just ignored it and taught him anyway.

Ours is exactly the same! Still using outdated covid rules as well like limiting the amount of people per swimming session to 20 even though it's a huge 25m pool, plus only get a 40 min session which you MUST prebook even though before Covid it was "general swimming 8am-2pm" and you could turn up anytime and stay as long as you like.
It is council run.

Our leisure centre is the same. Can't book the kids into soft play from the same account because they need to have a kids account each. So they each have a separate kids account which is different to my account. They've just changed their swimming booking system too so you now can't book members in online. I used to be able to book myself and my son (a member) in for leisure swimming by inputting his membership number, can't do that now.

And to add insult to injury they've got rid of the telephone queue as well. It'll put you on hold for one minute and then if noone answers in that time, it tells you to call back later. I tried booking swimming for Tuesday this week and it took me several attempts to get through 🙄

There are many things that are a bad legacy of the Thatcher/Major years, and the contracting out of leisure services is one. At least in the OPs case the facilities are good.

The Brittas Empire was a bit too near to the truth.

Yes ours is terrible. Website is completely unusable.

Yesterday I rang them 13 times trying to find out what time the family swim was. Each time it was answered with a message saying I was in the queue and then 5 mins later it automatically cut off each time.

In the end I drove there to ask them in person and they told me the wrong times for today, so got there and had to come home 🙄

We've visited various leisure centres on our holidays over the past few years and nothing gives me so as much rage as using a series of useless websites to try to book a swimming session or trying to understand complicated swim timetable.

I miss the days you could just turn up with your swimmers and go swimming pretty much whenever you fancied.

I had a similar problem and asked one of the staff (in person) and she was able to link our accounts so that I can book a swim for me and for DD at the same time. It was infuriating before. It might be worth checking if something like that is possible? Depends on the exact system obviously.

Oh god ours too.

I have to use two separate email addresses to book swimming lessons for both DDs, because it can’t cope with the idea that I want lessons for both a one year old and a four year old.

I'd just ring them up.

Bit of a pain in the arse but definitely more convenient than their website.

Ours is rubbish with a lot of duplication, but at least I can book for us all in one go!

Is it run by the council? My last one was the same - I reckon they plump for the cheapest shittest system