The booking system built by a venue operator, for venues that make their money from groups, parties and events.
One system for online booking, payments, group sales and customer follow-up. Proven every day in Fayre Play's own venues.
- In live use since
- September 2026
- Built for
- Activity venues with 1 to 10 sites
- Features released in 2026
- More than 120
- Open to outside venues
- Early 2027
Generic booking tools lose the big bookings to phone calls and email chains. BigSteve takes them online.
Get the big bookings online
Parties, groups and corporate events can be booked, paid by deposit or split between guests, and managed without a single phone call.
Stop chasing
Deposits, balances, final numbers and reminders run themselves. Staff time goes on guests, not admin.
Built by operators
Every feature was designed on a real venue floor and used in live trading before being offered to anyone else. Come and watch it run on a Saturday.
One system instead of four or five
Most venues pay separately for booking, a CRM, email marketing and a sales inbox. BigSteve does all of these on one database, so bookings, payments, customers and messages always agree.
Online booking
- Packages, add-ons and time slots
- Capacity by lane, area or session
- Kids' hours and special opening hours
- Waitlist and abandoned-basket recovery
Payments
- Card payments, deposits and staged payments
- Split payments where each guest pays their share
- Refunds, including refund to voucher
- Card terminals in venue
Gift vouchers
- Money and package vouchers
- Pay by voucher at checkout
- Bulk corporate orders and import
In venue
- Check-in and walk-ins
- Daily run sheet
- End-of-day cash-up
- Allergy alerts
Group and corporate sales
- Enquiry pipeline and quotes
- Multi-option proposals and held bookings
- Date polls and final-numbers review
- Shared sales inbox and SMS
Customers and marketing
- Customer records and visit history
- Contact preferences and consent
- Editable email journeys with venue branding
- How-did-you-hear tracking
Management
- Revenue reporting and booking pace
- Payout reconciliation
- Staff roles and logins
- Head-office view across venues
Independent activity venues and small groups across the UK
A strong fit
- Competitive socialising venues: independents and groups of 2 to 15 sites
- Independent bowling and multi-activity venues
- Family entertainment centres, soft play and trampoline parks
- Escape rooms, crazy golf, axe throwing and karting
- Any venue where parties, hen and stag groups and corporate events are a big share of sales
Not the right fit yet
- National chains of 20 or more sites that need enterprise procurement and integrations
- Restaurant-led businesses where tables, not activities, are the product
- Attractions selling mostly day tickets
- Venues that need a full till (POS) replacement as part of the deal
- Venues outside the UK
A fixed monthly price per venue
No percentage of your takings. Three plans, billed monthly, with a small fee per online booking that you can pass on to the customer. All prices exclude VAT.
Essentials
£295 per venue, per month
For single venues moving off a basic booking tool
- Online booking with packages and add-ons
- Card payments and deposits
- Gift vouchers
- Check-in and cash-up
- Confirmation and reminder emails
Professional
£495 per venue, per month
For venues with a lot of group and party trade
- Everything in Essentials
- Enquiries, quotes and proposals
- Split payments between guests
- Customer records and email journeys
- SMS and revenue reporting
Group
£695 per venue, per month
For operators with 2 or more sites
- Everything in Professional
- Head-office view across venues
- Shared sales inbox
- Reporting across sites
| Other charges | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Online booking fee | 25p per booking | Can be passed to the customer as a booking fee |
| Setup | £1,500 per venue | Configuration, data import from your current system, and staff training |
| SMS | Cost plus 20% | Billed monthly |
| Extra training or onsite days | £400 a day | After the first go-live visit |
| Card processing | Paid to your payment provider | Each venue uses its own merchant account. Customer payments never pass through BigSteve |
Contracts are monthly after an initial three-month term. Pay a year up front and get two months free. See the terms for the summary of our standard agreement.
Founding customer offer
The first five venues to join in 2027 get the setup fee waived, their price locked for 24 months, priority support and a say in what gets built next. In return we ask for a 12-month term, a case study and two reference visits or calls.
Running real venues, not a demo
BigSteve was built in 2026 to run Fayre Play, a competitive socialising operator with venues in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle. Fayre Play's Edinburgh venue has taken every online and in-venue booking on BigSteve since 1 September 2026, with Glasgow and Newcastle following by the end of 2026.
It handles the jobs generic booking tools do badly: large groups, split payments, deposits, parties and corporate sales. It is the system Fayre Play's venue staff and central sales team use every day.
- Every change is tested on a preview, then on a staging copy of the live setup, before it reaches production
- An automated test pack books real customer journeys end to end before each release
- Load tested for peak demand in September 2026, with warm pages loading in about 0.2 seconds
- Error monitoring and automated operational alerts
- Runs on established cloud services with no servers to maintain
About BigSteve
BigSteve is a UK software company. The platform was built to run a multi-venue competitive socialising operator and is now being made available to other UK leisure and activity venues, starting in early 2027.
The company is set up separately from any venue operator, so customers are not buying from a competitor and every venue's data is kept strictly apart. Our first customer uses BigSteve on the same standard terms as anyone else.
The team has run venues for several years and built BigSteve around the jobs generic booking tools handle badly: large groups, deposits, split payments, parties and corporate sales. Every feature was designed on a real venue floor before being offered to others.
Talk to us
Book a 30-minute demo, or come and watch BigSteve run at one of Fayre Play's venues on a Saturday.
BigSteve
Email: hello@bigsteve.co.uk
United Kingdom