School Manager's Update

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue63 1–30 June 2025

Since the launch of our new booking system in late January, we have seen a tremendous increase in private stargazing and historical tour bookings. The new system allows members of the public to seamlessly book in a session at a chosen date and time. All payments and refunds (in the event of bad weather) are now handled effortlessly through the new system.

This is a monumental improvement from our previous method, where a customer would have to send an initial email enquiry, followed by a few extra email exchanges before settling on a suitable date and time. Payments would either be manually taken on the night or afterwards by a manual invoice request system.
I encourage you all to have a look at our outreach-booking page. 

Since moving to the new, graphically enticing, user-friendly booking system, we have seen a substantial year-on-year growth in private bookings of 235%. For the period Feb to May 2025, we have taken 125 private stargazing bookings and 43 school bookings. For the same period in 2024, we had 53 private and 38 school bookings for comparison. 

We regularly receive positive feedback about the factual and passionate nature of the experience. I can also personally vouch for this, as I regularly witness school group tours outside my office. Occasionally I joke that I have to time my meetings and breaks between school groups, otherwise I am trapped by 2 dozen keenly listening kids. A very special thanks to our outreach staff for running the stargazing and tour sessions. Thanks also to Cate and Cristy, IT and Brad for implementing the booking system. It has been a huge amount of hard work.

Ps: Thank you to the students who have recently provide some internal feedback on the outreach operation. We are looking at this closely and will be making updates/changes as appropriate. Stay tuned. 

Mat Malzacher