Sailia vs Gladstone: leisure management system or experience platform?

For leisure centres, trusts and membership venues.

Short answer: Gladstone is a UK leisure management system used by councils, trusts, universities and clubs to run memberships, Direct Debits and facility bookings. Sailia handles memberships and Direct Debit too, and connects them to activity bookings, qualified staffing, equipment, waivers and marketing. The distinction is how much of the experience operation one platform covers.

What Gladstone is built for

Gladstone has supplied leisure operators since 1999. Its products, including Plus2 and Gladstone360, cover membership management, Direct Debit collection, class and facility bookings, access control, point of sale and reporting. Customers range from local authority leisure centres to university sports departments.

Pricing is by quote, with review sites listing a starting point of £9,999 a year.

Sailia for leisure centres and membership venues

Sailia is built for membership venues. Large Direct Debit estates, monthly, quarterly and annual plans, pauses and plan changes. Classes, courses and waitlists. Turnstiles and barriers for members and day visitors. EPOS at reception and in the cafe. It already runs for councils and public bodies. It is a platform, so each of these is an app you switch on, all sharing one set of customer data.

Picture a Monday morning. Members tap through the barrier. The 9am class fills from its waitlist. A failed Direct Debit is retried without anyone chasing. Reception sells a day pass and a coffee on the same till. In the afternoon the same system runs the climbing sessions, with instructors and kit assigned.

Sailia vs Gladstone at a glance

How Gladstone compares to Sailia

• Membership at scale. Gladstone runs very large Direct Debit estates. So does Sailia.

• Access control. Sailia has turnstile and barrier integrations for members and for ordinary activity bookings.

• Public sector experience. Sailia already works with councils and is ready for public sector procurement.

Where Sailia goes further

The experience side of a leisure venue

Holiday camps, climbing, saunas, soft play, birthday parties. These need an instructor with the right ticket, kit that is not double-booked and a signed waiver. Sailia treats them as first-class products, with staffing and capacity worked out from the booking.

One system for members and day visitors

Members get their pricing, members-only tickets and included passes applied on their own. Day visitors book, pay and sign in the same checkout. Both appear on one register.

Reach beyond your own website

Sell sessions through GetYourGuide, Tripadvisor and Google Things to Do with availability synced live. That is not something a traditional leisure system offers.

Buy it the way that suits you

Usage-based pricing means no large invoice before the season starts. Larger groups can take an annual licence with an SLA instead.

Sailia in detail for leisure and membership venues

The comparison above is the summary. This is what sits underneath it, app by app.

Accounting that reconciles itself

Most booking systems stop at a sales export. Sailia does the accounting. Sales, fees, refunds and payouts sync to Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, Oracle and FreeAgent, mapped to your own nominal codes and categories.

It also handles deferred revenue. Money taken in March for a course in July is recognised when the session happens, not when the card was charged. Deposits, instalments, vouchers, passes and memberships are treated the same way, so your accounts show what you have earned and what you still owe in sessions.

For a finance team that means no month-end spreadsheet to untangle. Operators save hundreds of hours a year on reconciliation, and every payout matches to the bookings behind it.

A platform, not a single product

Gladstone is a product. It does a defined job, and you shape your business around it. Sailia is a platform of connected apps: bookings, payments, POS, memberships, CRM and marketing, staffing, kit, waivers, reporting and more. Use one or use them all. A one-person business can run on bookings and payments alone. A multi-site group can run every site, team and sales channel from the same account.

It is also AI-native. Every record in Sailia, from bookings and customers to staff, kit and your own custom fields, is linked to the others, so an AI can reason across the whole business instead of one table at a time. Sailia’s MCP server connects your workspace to ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants, with more than 500 operations available and each connection limited to the permissions of the person who authorised it. Ask what sold last week, move a booking, build a campaign for lapsed customers.

Lia, Sailia’s built-in AI agent, goes a step further. It watches your workspace, spots revenue you are missing and messages you on WhatsApp with what to do about it. Some operators have added six figures in revenue from those suggestions. Developers get the same reach through the API on every plan, so you can connect your own tools or build something bespoke on top. That is how one platform serves a sole trader and an enterprise group alike.

Ask Lia, and it is done

Lia is the AI agent built into Sailia. Tell it what you want in plain English, in the app or on WhatsApp. It shows you the plan, you approve it, and it does the work. For example:

• “Build next week’s rota for reception and classes.”

• “Set up an off-peak membership at £25 a month by Direct Debit.”

• “Who cancelled in the last 90 days? Send them a win-back offer.”

Jobs like these used to take hours. Lia can also set up memberships, pull reports and find revenue you are missing, because it can use every part of the platform.

Pricing compared

Gladstone is bought on annual licence, quoted to your estate. Sailia can be bought as a percentage of bookings, with nothing fixed, or on custom terms for larger operators.

For a venue adding activities to an existing leisure offer, the usage model lets you start without a capital decision. For a large membership-led estate, ask both suppliers to price your actual volumes.

Two more things to check on any quote. Sailia passes Stripe’s card fees through at cost, with no markup, where some systems add a margin. And you choose who pays the booking fee: absorb it, or pass it to the customer as a fixed amount or a percentage, which makes Sailia free to you. Larger operators can take a fixed fee instead.

For larger venues the model changes. Above £300,000 a year, Sailia moves to a fixed monthly or annual fee agreed around your business, so the cost stops climbing with every booking. If you are weighing Sailia against Gladstone at that scale, compare a fixed quote from each.

What operators report after moving to Sailia

An outdoor activity centre lifted online revenue by 37% after switching. A training charity replaced four systems in a one-week changeover at the height of summer, then beat its revenue record by 30%. A multi-activity venue took 98% of bookings online from day one. Another operator went from 30% to 100% online bookings with a 19.2% checkout conversion rate, and one school cut time on the phone by 75%.

Sailia is rated 5.0 on Capterra, and support replies in around five minutes on average. We started in watersports. Today nine in ten businesses on Sailia are in other sectors, from attractions and tours to leisure centres, camps and classes.

Moving from Gladstone to Sailia

Switching is quicker than you would expect. Sign-up takes a few minutes. Enter your website address and Lia reads it, then builds your activities, prices and schedule in Sailia for you to approve. Hand Lia any exports from Gladstone, such as customers, bookings, memberships and vouchers, and it uploads them.

Prefer us to do it? With dedicated onboarding, our team logs in to Gladstone with you, pulls the exports and sets everything up. Most businesses have everything in Sailia within a few hours, spend a day or two fine-tuning, then go live on their own website.

Which should you choose?

Choose Gladstone if:

• Your team knows Gladstone well and you only sell gym and pool memberships.

• You are tied into an existing licence term.

Choose Sailia if:

• You sell instructor-led activities, courses, camps or hire.

• You want waivers, kit and staffing tied to each booking.

• You want OTA reach and built-in marketing.

• You prefer to pay in line with trade.

Not sure which side you fall on? Talk to us and we’ll tell you plainly, even when the answer isn’t Sailia.

Frequently asked questions

Does Sailia collect memberships by Direct Debit?

Yes. Memberships can be billed monthly, quarterly or yearly by card or Bacs Direct Debit.

Can Sailia control turnstiles and gates?

Yes. Sailia has turnstile and barrier integrations that work for memberships and for ordinary activity bookings, alongside QR check-in on the register. Tell us what hardware you run and we will confirm the fit.

Can Sailia run alongside our existing leisure system?

Yes. Some venues start by moving activities and experiences to Sailia and decide on memberships later.

Can we connect Sailia to ChatGPT or Claude?

Yes. Sailia’s MCP server connects your workspace to ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants that support MCP. You sign in, choose a workspace and set what the assistant is allowed to do. The API is also available on every plan.

Last checked November 2026. Gladstone details come from its public website and independent review sites, and vendors change plans without notice, so confirm current terms with them before you decide. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we’ll correct it.