As this pandemic seems to never end, I was thinking how gyms are handling this crisis. Personally, I belong to LA Fitness a gym membership chain throughout the states. At the beginning of the pandemic they closed right away and gave members the ability to freeze their accounts. After COVID-19 kept spreading, closing down most of the country, LA Fitness gave the members the option to have a free month now, or have a free membership for the summer for one of their family members. I thought this was a good move by the gym. However, I was wondering how this Pandemic could affect gym memberships. Gyms are by definition pretty gross places. With multiple members in the locker room sweating, and defiantly not 6 feet away from each other, this is a heaven for diseases and germs. I wonder if the country and gyms open up soon, how will the gym try to combat this? I think gyms around the country will suffer and end up dropping the prices for memberships. I know of some gyms that are suffering so bad, they are offering free memberships to people to stick around and help clean the gyms after closing. I just hope if they do decide this, gyms won’t suffer too much, and I hope thy drop the price for my membership.
BoweryJE22
As members pay for access, and COVID preventing gyms from granting access – the only logical option for gyms was to extend their memberships by the time members could not go. My local gym does a good job at relationship building with its members, and I am excited to go back whenever things open back up!
This is such a relevant topic right now and I like how you started to analyze LA fitness’ sales procedures. To most, their ideas for members to save money/freeze accounts is just a way for them to keep customers happy, but you saw what they were really doing, and that was focusing on their sales process. Great real life example!!
I think the strategy that LA fitness and other likewise gyms took was a good move. If they had kept charging them, yes they would’ve brought in more money but lost many customers in the process.