Xn Leisure was officially born in 2006, the result of a buyout of leisure products and staff from Torex Retail: but in reality, the company’s experience in leisure management goes back over four decades. Xn – which became a Bramble Hub partner some years ago – is now one of the leaders in leisure software and expertise. The company’s solutions run at over 800 sites across the UK and Ireland, and over a million people use them on a regular basis.

All this means that Xn’s software must run across multiple platforms and be highly reliable. As Christian Barlow, Xn Leisure’s Business Development Manager, put it: “People need to access our products instantly, 24/7. We run across all platforms: online, mobile, or via tablets on our customers’ premises.”

While Xn has large customers – such as Places Leisure – its product set and pricing is aimed at leisure businesses of all sizes, across all sectors of the industry.

“Our vision, is to be the number one strategic partner for health, wellbeing and leisure”

— Christian Barlow

To achieve that goal, Xn Leisure has created a formidable product set spanning a wide variety of leisure industry needs. Its flagship product is Leisure Hub, which provides leisure users with a single point of access to timetables and bookings. In the staff portal, the product supports operations management, as well as allowing staff members to emulate customers and carry out operations on their behalf. This latter feature, Christian points out, allows a “concierge approach”, in which staff can support customers that do not want, or are not able, to carry out online operations themselves.

A new integrated module – called Ticket Hub – allows access to events and activities to be sold to singles, groups and families. And another part of the system, Course Hub, enables leisure facilities to manage lessons and courses online, as well as allowing parents to monitor their children’s progress via a parent portal. “Other platforms,” says Christian, “require the user to login to another system to manage events and courses. Our platform integrates all that seamlessly into one.”

Xn offers a number of other modules that support the management of facilities, equipment and stock control as well as providing comprehensive management reporting. Because each facility is different, the suite can be tailored: “Everything is modular and can be adapted to suit the environment.”

The payment aspect of the system – Xn Pay – supports cards (of course) as well as cash, cheque, and loyalty cards and can provide direct debit processing services if required.

Bramble Hub and Xn Leisure have proven to be successful partners: so far, seven local authorities have purchased Xn’s software and services through us, via frameworks, and more deals are in the pipeline.