Early-in memberships?
Anyone actually use this feature? We are thinking of adding it because we are packed to the gills during busy hours, but only have a handful of members who check in at other times. We are trying to grow membership but people get turned off walking into a full gym. Hoping a discount might encourage people to spread out. How much do you discount by? Do you allow members to pay a small fee to check in late? Just looking for some info from anyone who has some mileage on it before we jump in.
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Hutson,
We do use this feature.
Our time is 3PM. Technically, the people with these memberships are not supposed to come in on weekends either, but RGP does not look at weekdays vs weekends.
Here is a link to our rates: http://portlandrockgym.com/rates/
The discount is a bit all over the place because we have tried to push this kind of deal with certain memberships.
We do allow people with this membership to pay $5 to climb after 3pm or on a weekday.
What we are seeing with the analytics is that we have huge spikes right when we open in the morning then lulls during the day and spikes again at around 5PM. How early do you open in the mornings? For us there is a crew of people who come in before work on our early days (Tuesday/Wed @ 7pm). I do not know if they do it because the gym is already less crowded than after work or if it is because the price is better. Or both. I do know a lot of facilities are moving to embrace earlier hours (Vertical World opens at 6am every day during the week).
Thanks very much for sharing this info! So far I had heard from a few people on Facebook but didn't have any rate info, and some places just do an early day pass rate, which we already do as a student discount.
Our current hours are 12pm-10pm, 7 days a week. Until May of this year, it was 3-10 on weekdays, and we had "Members Only Hours" 9-10:30pm on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, as well as 12-3pm on Wednesday. This tended to make staff unhappy, however, because the people who usually climbed until 10:30 practically had to be chased out with a broom, and the closing staff would end up getting home really late and miserable. We tried opening at 7am for a while a couple of years ago, and got virtually no traffic at all. It might be something to explore in a few months if we grow our membership numbers enough, although currently a lot of our route-setting time is Tuesday mornings so we would need to work around that somehow.
Right now our peak hours are definitely 7-9pm, though since we started opening in the afternoons there are small groups that sometimes visit in the afternoon, but not consistently.
I think if we go ahead I'll probably start in January and offer 20% off our EFT rate, with a late check-in fee of $5.
If anyone else has more experiences, please do share.
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