Virgin Active(ly) misleading you on price

If you’ve ever been into a chain gym, like Virgin Active, David Lloyd, Bannatynes, The Village, etc. what I’m about to say will seem familiar to you.

I could do with a gym membership again, it’s marathon training time and during winter sometimes its impossible to run due to snow or ice, so a warm treadmill inside is a welcome alternative. To that end I foolishly wandered into the doors of my very local Virgin Active and enquired about membership.

I won’t prevaricate; these places are a rip-off. For membership you’re paying way over the odds and you’ll regret ever going in there for one reason or another, but what you probably don’t realise is just what an insidious bunch of conniving bastards these people are.

Ask yourself, why aren’t prices advertised on any of the websites for these big brands? Why do they all want you to hand over some contact details in an online enquiry? Why, if you ring, do they refuse all mention of price and try everything to get you in the door?

Many of you already know the answer; it’s because there is no fixed price for membership. The salesmen, and that is what they are, rival second-hand car dealers in the bullshit stakes. The price they eventually quote is based on how much of a sucker they think you are. They determine that during the visit they pressure you to make, where they show you all the equipment, the facilities, the pool, the toilets that gently caress your buttocks, etc. They’re waiting for you to say ‘Gee Stan, that sounds really useful!’, and every time you show appreciation, the price will increase.

Ignore all insistence from them that the prices and deals fluctuate so rapidly they couldn’t possibly post their prices anywhere public – this is a lie, and today I even saw proof of it.

But I digress. I’m there, sat opposite ‘Chris’, a terribly friendly person, while he asks me what I need the gym for. There was no way I was going to give him any encouragement, so I indifferently said I was looking for the occasional use of a treadmill and nothing more. We took the tour anyway. Did I want to use the pool? No, I’m crap at swimming. What about the weight equipment? Nope, I don’t need it. Fitness classes? No mate, I’m here for a treadmill, remember?

With my dead eyes betraying no emotion we quickly head back to the omnipresent health bar while he disappears briefly to ‘check something’. He comes back with a printed breakdown of membership prices. But wait! Printed prices? Well surely I’m wrong then, the prices must be fixed if they’re PRINTED ON PAPER.

No sir, if they had less than half a dozen price permutations printed up I’d be surprised. They merely choose one that corresponds to your impressionability quotient.

I think I did fairly well. The piece of paper has 4 different prices on it, which I’ll recreate here but naturally in no way is this a benchmark or a basis for what the price might be anywhere else in the UK, or indeed to anyone else walking into this very branch on the same day:

Full Flexi: £67.00
Peak-access, on a 1-month rolling contract.

Diamond: £59.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract.

Joint Diamond: £55.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract (and presumably for couples)

Off-peak: £55.00
(9-4pm only)

Like I said, a rip-off. On the same sheet Chris then scrawls ‘3 month – £64.00’, which he assures me is a 3 month contract that flips over to the 1 month contract thereafter, but at the same price. Still with me? Alright.

I think I did well because Chris ignores the line that says ‘Diamond’, crosses out the ‘Joint’ part of the ‘Joint Diamond’ line, and then circles the price that says £55.95, indicating that this is the price that me, the single person, would pay.

Also on this piece of paper is a line that says ‘Joining Fee: £40’. Chris crosses (haha) this out and writes ‘£20’ instead. Blimey, I really *must* have done well. The page also states ‘Freeze Fee: £7 flexi/£5 Diamond‘. A frozen membership is the feature some gyms offer if you know you’re not going to use your membership on a certain month. Instead of paying full whack, you just pay the freeze but obviously you can’t use the facilities. Sounds fair doesn’t it?

I point out the advantage of the freeze feature to Chris, who says ‘Oh you can’t do that within the first 12 months’. Hang on Chris, given the contract shifts to a rolling 1-month deal after that (where if you weren’t using the gym you could just cancel for free, presumably?!), when would this ‘freeze’ feature apply? Similarly, if you’re on a ‘Flexi’ deal which is touted as a 1 month rolling contract anyway, how could a Freeze Fee possibly apply there? The only thing I can think of is that paying this fee is cheaper than quitting only to re-join again and pay the joining fee within 6 months (as after this point you wouldn’t have saved anything on the £40 joining fee), but who is going to do that?

I ask a few questions and push for a further discount but it doesn’t get me anywhere, so I thank Chris for his time and leave. Before I go though I’m reminded that if I want the £20 joining fee I must tell them today because it’s for TODAY ONLY and a TIME LIMITED OFFER that will probably NEVER COME AGAIN. Mmmhmm.

I toddle off home and start looking at Virgin Active reviews online (they average 1.6/5 on reviewcentre.com, for reasons I’ll come to shortly) and my eye is caught by two other local gyms in my area, one of which is £25 a month (price advertised online!) with pretty similar facilities. Looks tempting.

While I’m sitting there musing my options, my mobile rings. By jove, it’s Chris from Virgin Active ringing to inform me of a super deal ‘that’s just been released by Head Office’. Wow Chris, I’m shitting myself at the prospect of this deal, what on earth could it be?! Oh it’s good, it’s very good. I’m being offered the first month FREE with the only thing to pay being the £20 joining fee, and he assures me it’s for a one-month contract so I’d be under no obligation thereafter. A £67 monthly membership for only £20?! How can I resist?

Except I do, and tell Chris no thanks, but I make a point of thanking him for thinking of me and I assure him that I appreciate it. Chris responds as if I’ve just taken a dump in his lunchbox, but moodily says ‘no problem’ and rings off. He called no more than 45 minutes after I left the gym. Evidently he was nervous because I didn’t cave at the time, and was then annoyed when I wasn’t tempted by the deal he’d made up on the spot.

Now, interestingly PruHealth (private health insurers, similar to Bupa), offer reduced rate gym membership to their ‘Vitality Partners’, which includes Virgin Active. I’d been reading up on their site earlier that day and could see they offer around 25% off membership if you have an insurance plan with them. Given the membership fees I’ve noted above, I worked out that I could take out a private insurance plan AND a gym membership for around £5 more a month than the gym would be alone, so on that basis it’s clearly better to go through PruHealth, right? Wrong.

I mentioned this to Chris during our meeting but was obviously quite vague about my knowledge and asked for more details. He basically shat (to use the most appropriate word) all over his ‘Vitality Partner’ and said that PruHealth members ‘weren’t real members’ and that the Pru had recently whacked up their prices so much so that a lot of people were leaving and coming to them separately. Talk about fostering corporate business relationships there Chris. I was given no information on the expected discount, and was basically told to not do it. Nice.

A further note regarding Virgin Active, purely in the interests of full disclosure. In researching them and trying in vain to get a comparison on membership prices, I saw an awful lot of people complaining on forums about the difficulty in getting out of their 12-month Diamond memberships. Apparently the verbal assurance that after 12 months it switches to a ‘rolling 1 month’ arrangement did not materialise in the fine print. Consequently many people have found their 12 month membership renewed for another 12 months without their consent, only to be told they had no recourse and could not cancel. Some people (and if you wish to search online, you will find plenty of anecdotal evidence on this) were offered deals to pay-off their remaining term at 50% of the regular rate, but during that time were not allowed to use any of the gym facilities. Paying 50% for nothing on a contract extension you didn’t want? Good lord.

So, to summarise: There is no fixed price, it’s a rip-off even if you insist you’ll never turn up or use any of the equipment. Be wary about contract terms. Never agree to anything on the day. Get the contract in your hand, take it home, and read it carefully. The trouble is, everything about this process involves pressure, and even knowing every trick and deceit used against me I too felt some level of desire to sign up on the spot. Your average consumer has no chance against such an onslaught, and like so many things in this world, it’s just plain wrong. A reputable organisation wouldn’t need misdirection and deceit to sell their service; it should stand alone on its own merit without the need for tactical selling bordering, in my humble view, on fraud.

One final thought. A counter-argument I’ve seen against the whole ‘My membership prices don’t match those of other members’ insisted that membership prices change daily, and so any variation is simply members taking advantage of different offers on different days.

I wonder why, then, while I was sitting there at the Health Bar, I observed a young lady being sold her gym membership, concluded by the salesperson with the words, ‘So, how would you like to pay your £75 today?’.

Get out, girl, get out while you still can.