Sports facility marketing budgets can fund services that route people to bookings

A starting point for finding sports data

As of September 2026, the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation operates the KSPO Data Map (KSPO 데이터 지도). It lets people find Foundation data that had been split across the Public Data Portal and the Culture Big Data Platform, then directs them to the original data page.

Users can search topics including sports facilities, National Fitness 100, the Sports Course Voucher, sports instructors, and surveys of participation in recreational sports. They can also see whether data is available as a downloadable file or through a connection method that other services can use automatically.

The data map cannot complete every task. Actual file downloads and access applications must be handled on the site where the source data is published, and update timing and conditions of use must be checked separately for each dataset.

As of September 2026, the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation organisation page on the Culture Big Data Platform shows 95 datasets. Some, such as nationwide public sports facility data, are updated once a year. Others, such as eligibility for sports industry support, do not have a fixed update cycle. That makes them difficult to use unchanged in a real-time service.

Demand is not small. In the 2023 National Survey on Sports Participation, conducted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism with 9,000 people aged 10 and over, 62.4% participated regularly in recreational sports and 28.3% used public sports facilities. Among people aged 70 and over, lack of facility information was the most common reason for not using sports facilities, at 25.8%.

The newly accessible budget is the operator’s existing budget

Consider the manager of an operations team with four staff at a district-run sports centre. To fill swimming and badminton classes, this person posts notices on the district office website, checks the facility booking site, and answers calls about remaining places.

When planning a new class, the team searches for nearby facilities’ activities and operating hours, then re-enters addresses and contact details into documents. It must call again to learn whether a facility accepts the Sports Course Voucher, whether an older person can walk there, and whether applications have closed.

Assume this manager writes an annual plan for promotion and booking-screen improvements, which is approved by the facility director and the district office staff member. Performance could be assessed by the number of users in empty time slots, the share of first-time users, and the reduction in repeated phone enquiries.

The range of products that can be bought with existing leaflet-production, online-promotion, website, and booking-screen improvement budgets has widened. Teams can spend less time establishing that data exists by searching multiple sites, and more on screens that take actual users to a booking page.

Using the data map, the team can find nationwide sports facility data and voucher-eligible facility data to create a small pilot service. A user selects a neighbourhood, activity, and day of the week, reads a facility description, and moves to the original booking page. The operations team sees which searches lead to bookings and chooses the following month’s promotion audience.

The sales approach should therefore change too. Rather than selling residents a paid data-search app, it makes more sense to offer district offices or facility operators a tool to fill empty classes and reduce repeated enquiries. In the first contract, the evidence should be operational outcomes such as new-user numbers, moves to booking pages, and fewer phone enquiries, not the number of datasets.

Much work still remains manual. Whether today’s remaining places, actual fees, accessible facilities for people with disabilities, and closures are available and current must be checked dataset by dataset. If data changes once a year, the service should show both the last verification date and whether it was confirmed by phone.

Outside Korea, budgets are used to fill facilities

The United Kingdom’s OpenActive is a framework that enables different facilities to publish activities, times, locations, and prices in the same format. The same format means matching field names and publishing methods so different services can use the data without reorganising it.

Everyone Active, a leisure facility operator, connected this data to external activity-search services. In a case introduced by the Open Data Institute in the United Kingdom, around 11,500 customers came through these services, and 36% of them had never used the operator’s services before. These figures come from a case introduced by the Open Data Institute, so whether the same result occurs elsewhere requires separate verification.

In the Netherlands, SportMatch is structured so local governments and sports federations pay the initial build cost and an annual usage fee, while residents and local clubs participate free of charge. Clubs post trial classes and activities and collect participation fees directly.

The Netherlands Olympic Committee and Sports Federation announced that, from 2022 to 2023, sports participation in participating regions rose by 11% and bookings for club activities rose by 34%. These are figures counted by the platform operator, but they make the buyer clear: not residents, but local governments that need to increase local sports participation.

Singapore’s government-run ActiveSG lets people find and book public sports facilities and programmes in one place. It charges for facility passes and programme participation, and it also lets citizens use government-provided sports support funds within the service.

According to the government-operated screen, it had 397,748 active users in the first quarter of 2025 and recorded 2.96 million hours of exercise. Its relevance for a Korean purchasing proposal is that it does not stop at building booking screens: it manages actual exercise time as a public-service outcome.

Four things to build now

1. A neighbourhood exercise guide for older residents

This service takes an address and walking time, then shows nearby public sports facilities and affordable classes in large type, including the date a staff member confirmed the information by phone. It is used jointly by residents in their seventies who receive smartphone help at welfare centres and by counselling staff.

For people aged 70 and over, lack of facility information was a major barrier. Now that the location of facility data can be found in one place, a small version can be built first with a district office’s sports and welfare budget. The first screen includes fields for neighbourhood, walking time, fee range, and a phone-confirmed status.

2. A map of Sports Course Voucher registration gaps

This service shows voucher-registered facilities alongside nearby sports facilities and manages facilities that need registration guidance. It is used by district office staff who need to expand where the voucher can be used, and by neighbourhood taekwondo schools and swimming pools considering registration.

Because nationwide sports facility data and voucher-facility data are now easier to find together, less time is needed to create a candidate list. The first screen shows a map by neighbourhood, with registered facilities, unregistered candidates, contact completed, and registration in progress separated by colour.

3. A public sports facility open-slot noticeboard

When centre staff enter remaining times and places directly, this service immediately updates a resident-facing search screen and booking links. It is for operations teams at district-run swimming pools or badminton courts that announce same-day cancellation places by phone and noticeboard.

Public data provides basic facility information, but not real-time open places. That gap creates an opportunity to sell a small operational tool. The first screen includes today’s timetable, remaining places, a publish button, and the time of the last update.

4. A sports facility safety-action record

This service groups inspection photos and identified issues by facility, recording the responsible person, due date, and completion photos. It is for facility-management organisations that manage safety inspection results for multiple gyms across separate documents and photo folders.

The Public Data Portal provides a sports facility defect-photo dataset with 265 rows, including inspection dates, addresses, inspection items, and photo addresses, which can be used to test the screen design. The first screen includes a map of unresolved facilities, overdue actions, and before-and-after inspection photos. Its publication scope should be reviewed alongside facility security and correction procedures.

Why this matters where you are

Korea’s case depends on Korean public datasets, district-office budgets, and systems such as the Sports Course Voucher. In your market, check who already pays to promote underused facilities, improve booking screens, or increase local participation. You can test whether the buyer is a local authority, facility operator, or sports organisation by measuring booking-page visits and reduced repeat enquiries.

What to check today

Spend 30 minutes on a call with one district office sports staff member or an operations manager at a facility management corporation. If at least two of these answers are yes—there is a recurring budget line for filling empty classes or expanding voucher-registered facilities; they can provide two real datasets for a pilot; and they will judge results by booking moves or fewer enquiries—it is worth building a small pilot service.