Maribyrnong City Council
Consolidating venue bookings and events to improve the digital customer experience
Customer Profile
How Maribyrnong replaced fragmented, manual booking processes with an online, council-wide solution – enabling self-service bookings, event registrations, integrated payments, and better reporting across teams.
Watch the case study
Why Watch This Case Study
Hear directly from council peers leading digital transformation from inside IT.
In this session, Maribyrnong shares:
- How they moved from forms, email and spreadsheets to a consistent council-wide booking experience
- Why they chose a staggered rollout (community centres → libraries → arts & culture)
- How Attekus Bookable supports both venue bookings and events (including ticketing and QR check-in)
- The integrations that mattered most (finance import, payments, portal access, reporting)
If you work in a similar organisation, this is a practical, real-world example of what’s possible.
Council's Challenge
Maribyrnong identified bookings as a priority digital experience issue after seeking input across council.
Key challenges included:
- 11 different areas hiring out venues/facilities, supported by multiple systems
- Staff struggling to find available rooms and double bookings being common
- A customer journey that relied on online forms or emailing customer service, followed by manual entry into systems or spreadsheets
- Back-and-forth communication that created friction and delays for customers
- Payments often handled manually (including taking payments over the phone)
They needed a council-wide solution that improved customer experience while simplifying internal operations.
The Approach
Maribyrnong evaluated products based on usability, support and value for money, using a rating system to compare options consistently. Attekus Bookable emerged as the clear preferred choice due to its usability and design.
Implementation included:
- A dedicated project approach with Attekus responsible for implementation, migration and training
- Early involvement from key internal stakeholders including IT, community centres, libraries, arts & culture, and finance
- A staggered rollout to support change adoption:
- Went live March 2022
- Started with community centres, then libraries, then arts & culture
Maribyrnong also adopted an approval workflow where bookings come in as tentative and are reviewed by staff before confirmation (configurable based on council preference).
Tangible Outcomes
Maribyrnong highlighted benefits across customer experience, operational control, and reporting.
For customers (self-service experience):
- Customers can search venues by activity type and find the best match
- Real-time availability browsing by venue and date
- Online booking flow with purpose-driven rules (pricing, documentation, terms)
- Customers can update, reschedule or cancel bookings without staff intervention
- Event discovery and registration through the same platform, including:
- Free and paid events
- Waitlists
- Tickets delivered via email (often as QR codes)
- On-site scanning/check-in via an Attekus app
For council teams (enterprise capability and integrations):
- Finance integration via file import into Civica Authority (manual upload chosen by council)
- Email integration to keep customer communications in one place
- Payment gateway support (Maribyrnong uses BPOINT / Commonwealth Bank)
- Portal integration: bookings connected to the My Maribyrnong community portal
- Identity and access: SSO using Okta with two-factor authentication, allowing users to move into Bookable without logging in again
- Reporting: strong default reporting plus support for custom reporting using a Power BI-based reporting platform
Key Learnings (Maribyrnong’s Advice to Other Organisations)
Maribyrnong’s approach reinforces a few practical lessons:
- Start by engaging areas of council and mapping where customer experience friction exists
- Build a council-wide stakeholder group early (IT, finance, service owners)
- Use a staged rollout to support adoption and reduce change risk
- Prioritise integrations that remove re-keying and reduce manual processes
- Use reporting from day one to understand utilisation and service performance
What’s Next
Maribyrnong is expanding Attekus Bookable into additional services, including:
- Sports grounds for the parks and gardens team
- Supporting seasonal sports programs (summer and winter), with sports teams managing their programs directly within Attekus Bookable
Still managing bookings and events across emails, forms and spreadsheets?
See how organisations are simplifying bookings and events with one connected, enterprise solution.
Related case studies
City of Launceston
See how the City of Launceston located in northern Tasmania, Australia, revitalised a historic site and empowered the community with a seamless self-service booking platform.
Future-Proofing Course Delivery in Federal Government
Read how a national federal government agency replaced a heavily manual booking process built on legacy Access and Excel with a streamlined, end-to-end solution, connecting course setup, registrations, approvals and invoicing to cut risk, improve visibility, and reduce processing timelines that had stretched to 140 days.
