Easy to join, hard to leave

The Editor,

In 2019 I took out a membership at a national gym in Dubbo. I used the gym frequently and had numerous conversations with the local manager about the lengthy times I spend overseas.

Before I left to go abroad in February 2020 I asked the manager to suspend my membership. However, I noticed that gym fees were being debited from my bank account while I was still overseas due to the worldwide pandemic.

When it became clear in April 2020 that travelling back to Australia when I planned to would be impossible, I emailed their head office and asked them to suspend my membership ‘until further notice’. Fees again started being withdrawn from my account a couple of months later.

An exchange of emails revealed you can only suspend a membership for three months and then an automated debit system starts up again. The gym does not or can’t increase the suspension time even in the extenuating circumstances that existed last year and in 2021.

Checks on the number of times you visit the gym each month are done frequently so the manager must have realised I was still out of the country. They said actions weren’t taken ‘as per agreement’.

Similar deductions still occurred once again later in 2020.

Requests were again made to cancel my membership.

At this stage, as far as I was concerned the matter was over.

Then in April 2021 gym fees again started coming out of my account. Several emails were then exchanged and the manager told me I could not cancel the membership nor fees be refunded under the gym agreement.

If this had been made clear from the beginning I would not have joined up. It would have been too restrictive.

They finally cancelled my membership when they realised any change of address documents I gave them would have been in a foreign language.

My advice, beware of these types of gym agreements.

G. Smyth,

Dubbo