Finding 1
A booking system has to work after staff go home
59% of timezone-eligible completed bookings occurred outside 9 AM–5 PM local time, and 42.8% occurred from 7 PM through 6 AM. The highest-volume local hour was 7 PM.
This does not prove that online booking creates demand. It does show that a substantial share of already-completed transactions arrived when phone-only or front-desk-only enrollment would be least available.
Finding 2
Lead time was split between urgency and planning
21.8% of eligible bookings were placed less than one day before the lesson, while 50.1% were placed more than 14 days ahead. The median was 14 days.
Operators should therefore test both paths: a fast mobile checkout for near-term intent and a clear calendar for families planning weeks ahead.
Booking timing summary
| Measure | Share |
|---|---|
| Outside 9 AM–5 PM local time | 59% |
| 7 PM–6 AM local time | 42.8% |
| Saturday or Sunday | 22.5% |
| Less than one day before start | 21.8% |
| Within seven days of start | 38.4% |
| More than 14 days before start | 50.1% |
Local-time measures use 8,638 records; lead-time measures use 8,949 records.
Methodology
How the benchmark was produced
Swum ran a read-only aggregate extraction against its production operational records on July 31, 2026. The extraction never emitted document identifiers, names, emails, cancellation notes or other free text.
- Lesson cohort: past lessons only; schedule blocks, future records, failed or pending statuses, unsettled manual cash records and self-booking artifacts were excluded.
- Booking cohort: successful, non-manual parent orders with a valid creation time.
- Cancellation cohort: cancellation records with a valid cancellation time; schedule blocks were excluded.
- Account hygiene: 80 clearly internal, test, fake or generic coach accounts were excluded before analysis.
- Privacy: segmented findings require at least 10 records contributed by at least five provider accounts.
- Reproducibility: the published CSV contains the aggregate values used on these pages. It intentionally excludes row-level data.
Limitations
What this data cannot establish
- Only successful, non-manual orders were treated as completed parent bookings.
- Local-hour results exclude bookings without a valid explicit time zone; coverage was 90.2%.
- Lead-time results exclude negative values, missing timestamps and values over 400 days.