This workshop will help municipal recreation professionals look beyond surface-level booking totals and explore the difference between what is booked, what is available, and what is truly utilized. Participants will examine how facility data can uncover patterns in prime and non-prime usage, internal and external bookings, unique users, day-of-week and time-of-day trends, online booking behaviour, amendments, cancellations, and year-over-year changes. Participants will explore practical ways to work with facility booking data to better understand capacity, demand, and operational decision-making. The session will look at how basic Excel tools, including sorts, filters, formulas, and pivot tables, can help turn exported booking records into clear utilization metrics, availability summaries, and usage patterns, while advanced tools such as AI can help take the analysis further by summarizing trends, identifying anomalies, testing assumptions, and communicating findings more clearly. The session will also examine how to run and interpret availability analysis, identify assumptions and gaps in the data, and understand how amendments, cancellations, online booking behaviour, advance booking patterns, and booking times can add important context to utilization reporting. Finally, the session will touch on cost recovery metrics and one of the trickiest parts of facility planning: understanding demand that never shows up neatly in a report, including turned-away requests, informal inquiries, and booking opportunities that were lost before they became actual bookings. Please note: This session is presented using data from Xplor Recreation databases, so specific formats, terminology, available fields, and data points may vary in other recreation software applications or municipal configurations.

Available times and locations

Ontario