OpenActive explained: what facility owners need to know

OpenActive explained: what facility owners need to know

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OpenActive is the open data standard for the UK's physical activity sector. It's been around since 2016, is backed by Sport England, and is now the primary mechanism by which aggregators, apps, and booking platforms discover session data across the country. If your facility isn't publishing a compliant feed, a growing number of channels simply can't list you — not because of a commercial decision, but because they're built to read OpenActive data and nothing else.

This post covers what the standard is, who governs it, what it requires from operators in practice, and where Find My Facility fits in.

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What OpenActive is, and who runs it

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OpenActive defines how sports and activity session data should be structured and shared. Think of it as a common language: if your booking system publishes session data in the OpenActive format, any platform that speaks that language can read it, display it, and — where supported — make it bookable without a bespoke integration on either side.

The initiative was founded in 2016 with backing from Sport England. It is maintained by the Open Data Institute (ODI) and governed by an open community of operators, platforms, and public bodies. The specification itself is open-source and free to implement — there's no licence fee and no single commercial owner. Sport England's Active Places Power uses OpenActive feeds when indexing venue data, and several NHS and public health bodies have adopted it as a baseline requirement for data sharing.

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What data types it covers

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The specification defines three main data types operators can publish:

• Opportunity data — individual sessions or bookable slots (e.g. "Tuesday 7pm indoor cycling, Studio B, 8 spaces remaining, £12 per person").
• Facility data — the physical venue (name, location, sports on offer, opening hours, accessibility information).
• Booking data — the API layer that lets a consumer reserve and pay for a slot in real time, directly through the standard.

Most operators start with opportunity data. It's the highest-value layer for discoverability: platforms can index your classes and sessions even if they can't process payments through your system. Booking data is the more technically involved step and is typically handled by your booking platform rather than by you directly.

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What OpenActive actually requires from you

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The most common implementation is a data feed — a publicly accessible URL, hosted by your booking system, that outputs your session data as structured JSON-LD in the OpenActive format. If you use a platform like Gladstone, ClubRight, Xplor, or LoveAdmin, there's a reasonable chance it already has OpenActive support, either built in or available as an optional module.

If you're on a custom or legacy system, the work sits with your developer. They need to:

• Format your session data to match the OpenActive specification (the docs are public and well-maintained).
• Host a publicly accessible, automatically updating feed at a stable URL.
• Register the feed on the OpenActive dataset site so it can be discovered by platforms that crawl for new feeds.

You don't need to implement real-time booking to get value from the standard. A read-only opportunity feed is enough to get your sessions indexed by platforms like FMF. Booking integration is the next step if you want customers to be able to reserve slots without leaving the platform they found you on.

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Who actually consumes OpenActive data

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The feed is read by a range of platforms. Sport England's own tools pull from it. Apps used by local authorities, NHS trusts, and corporate wellness providers source session data through it. Find My Facility indexes OpenActive feeds directly — when a provider publishes a compliant feed, their sessions can appear alongside 700+ sports and activities on FMF without any additional data entry on their part.

For an operator, the practical benefit is distribution from a single implementation. One properly maintained feed can populate multiple platforms simultaneously. Without a compliant feed, each platform that wants to list you either needs a separate integration agreement or relies on you manually duplicating your schedule somewhere. That's a significant maintenance overhead as the number of platforms grows.

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How Find My Facility uses OpenActive

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FMF ingests OpenActive feeds directly. If your booking system already publishes a compliant feed, connecting to FMF typically requires no additional technical work from you. We validate the data, handle the republishing, and make sure your sessions appear with the correct availability and pricing information.

If your system doesn't yet support OpenActive, we also offer a direct integration path — the details are in our OpenActive data storage guide, which covers how FMF handles feed ingestion and validation on the backend.

Either way, the goal is the same: your sessions visible to people who are actively looking to book. If you want to see what listing looks like, become a provider on FMF and we can walk you through the connection options.