Cancellations and Freezes
Today the news reports that LA Fitness is being sued by the FTC for making it too hard for members to cancel. When you look at Google Reviews of large chain gyms, a common complaint is that it is difficult for members to cancel. This post is our thoughts on the topic of cancellations and freezes.
Cancellations are complicated. Our gym has been around for over twenty years, and various membership types have accumulated over time. Some members want to cancel their individual membership, others want to remove a secondary member, some want to remove themselves as primary and make their secondary primary, and of course we have the whole Kid's Zone thing. So it was a very manual process, and it took a lot of time to ensure everything was done correctly. The membership software we use is comprehensive, but complicated as a result.
We were able to enable online cancellations with ABC, our membership software provider and payment processor. Now members who would like to cancel can go to https://www.myiclubonline.com/iclub/members/signin, sign up for an account, and then navigate to "Agreements" and request cancellation. They can contact ABC directly for technical support. For the special cases above we will continue to handle them manually, and of course if the member really can't figure it out we are happy to do it on our end.
A quick note about the 30-day cancellation policy in the contract. This bit of money allows us to plan for the future--we schedule our employee hours a month out, budget for new equipment purchases, and have a couple other variable expenses, and most everything is paid for by member dues (that's the whole business!), so that's why we have a 30-day cancellation policy. The other reason is that the gym is very busy and we may not get to cancelling your contract for a couple weeks, but we always backdate the cancellation to the date of the first request. The 30-day cancellation policy gives us time to process your request if the member requires special assistance.
Freezes were granted liberally by prior ownership, and we are now enforcing only three months of freeze within the last twelve months. The annual fee will be charged even if a member is frozen. We sell day, week, month, and summer passes for customers that would like to use the gym for a shorter period of time, but freezing and unfreezing a regular gym membership is a huge administrative burden and unfair to regular members that pay year-round. But of course we understand medical issues and other reasons for freezing your membership.
Feel free to bring up any thoughts with the front desk, or email me at [email protected].
