Filling weekday and off-season hours in digital sports halls

An English summary of the 2026 off season playbook: traffic curves, six levers to refill the calendar, time based pricing, corporate buyouts and budget.

Off season is less about guests not coming and more about space and time not being sold. The full 2026 guide sets out how a digital sports hall refills weekday daytime, the months after school holidays, and bad weather days. This summary covers the parts that decide whether those hours can be sold.

Key points

Mature venues commonly take 25 40% of weekly traffic on weekday daytime, while most newly opened venues stay under 15%.
Read three curves together: annual (busiest in July August and January February, quietest in March April and October November), weekly (weekend traffic commonly two to four times weekday traffic), and daily (peak 19:00 22:00, trough 10:00 17:00).
Where the troughs overlap is where operating effort pays back most: weekday daytime in March April and October November.
Six levers refill the calendar: time based pricing and early bird sessions, corporate team building and buyouts, leagues and community, cross industry partnerships and joint tickets, study programmes and camps, and online content plus local lifestyle platforms.
Common price tiers: early bird 50 70% of full price, afternoon 60 80%, after work 70 80%, night 80 90%, weekends and holidays full price, and corporate buyouts quoted per session rather than per head.
Corporate clients are the anchor of the off season: they arrive in the emptiest hours, carry a high order value, can be invoiced and often refer other companies in the same park or sector.
Put 50 70% of the annual marketing budget into the two or three lowest months, and judge it on voucher redemption, signed buyouts and repeat rate rather than impressions.

Corporate buyouts are priced per session

The guide prices a corporate package in three parts: exclusive use of the space and equipment for two to four hours, a per head service and catering add on, and an execution fee for formats, a host, materials and prizes. It advises stating the minimum and maximum headcount, overtime charges, cleaning and damage responsibility, and a deposit in the quotation. The article also warns against answering a quiet season by cutting opening hours or staff, because shorter hours make daytime team building, study groups and partnership traffic harder to serve and fewer staff make events and content impossible; it recommends restructuring instead, moving idle hours into maintenance, training, community work and client visits, and scheduling major repairs and software upgrades in the low season when downtime costs least.

The full 2026 guide is published in Chinese; contact SPORTS ANT if you need it explained for your project.