Introduction
Subscriptions and memberships have quickly become a rather common occurrence in a modern world, offering a massive variety of products and services for a monthly or annual fee. There are many different fields and branches of subscription services, and most of them have their own specific terms of use and cancellation methods.
At the same time, there are quite a lot of different memberships and subscriptions that have been around as separate businesses for a while now, with examples such as the newspaper delivery and the gym membership. Both of these examples have their own specifics when it comes to membership management, and fitness centers would be the focus of this article.
Gold’s Gym
Fitness centers as a whole have a relatively complex history when it comes to membership management, with some of the more problematic and well-known examples working for both the US and the rest of the world. Gold’s Gym also has its own share of issues, despite the fact that it has been around for over fifty years and works in 38 different states of the US.
Since there are quite a lot of different fitness networks in the US alone, it is not uncommon for people to try and research how to cancel Gold’s Gym membership. Unfortunately, this process is as complicated as you might expect from a fitness company, with a lot of nuances and details being needlessly complicated and taking quite a lot of time.
First of all, there is no way to cancel your Gold’s Gym membership online, at all. There are only two possible paths that a member of Gold’s Gym membership can take – to personally visit the fitness center in question and fill out all of the required documents, or to use a regular mail to send a cancellation request to the fitness center.
This kind of approach turned out to be especially disastrous in the year 2020 when all of the Gold’s Gym locations were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event turned both of the existing membership cancellation methods unusable because a lot of the locations are a part of the franchise and have to process all of the cancellation requests in the same location the customer started its contract.
With these locations closed there was no one to accept the cancellation requests from the customers, which raised an understandable concern among Gold’s Gym users. Luckily enough, company-owned locations announced that membership due times were frozen for the period of fitness centers being closed.
While it is true that a lot of Gold’s Gym franchise-based fitness locations can have their own specific terms of membership cancellation, we can provide the baseline for both the “in person” and the “by mail” cancellation methods. Other details can differ from one location to another, with the terms of service in Oxnard being different from terms of service in Northridge, and so on.
How to cancel Gold’s Gym membership manually
Both of these processes are fairly straightforward in the way they work, aside from the general inconvenience of going to the actual gym to cancel your membership instead of doing it online. Aside from that, the process is not particularly complex – the first step would be to go to the gym in question to acquire the membership cancellation form.
This exact form needs to be filled out by your account-related information, and then you would have to submit it back to the gym where you got it in the first place. This is the entire process, but it does have a lot of complications. For example, it is heavily recommended to make sure that your cancellation request has been processed – you can do that by calling the gym in question two weeks after submitting the form.
Additionally, the Gold’s Gym terms of use have a 30 days notice for Gold’s Gym membership cancellation, with the client having to pay for the time they’re waiting for the cancellation to go through. Additionally, the Gold’s Gym cancellation policy has a requirement of the client paying for the remainder of the billing cycle with the addition of another billing cycle to pay for.
As such, if you want to cancel the Gold’s Gym membership three days before the next billing date (it is usually around the middle of the month), you would have to pay for 33 days in total.
How to cancel Gold’s Gym membership via mail
days in total.The only alternative to the “in person” Gold’s Gym membership cancellation is to fill out the cancellation form and mail it to the Gold’s Gym membership department. Our first step would be to retrieve the membership cancellation form from the gym itself. Since Gold’s Gym is a franchise organization, it is heavily recommended to also ask the gym’s staff for the correct mailing address.
As an alternative to that, you can also call the gym in question to receive the mailing address, if you have the phone number of that specific gym you were using. Our next step would be to fill out the form before mailing it. You would have to fill out quite a lot of information for the form to be deemed completed, including:
- Your full name and date of birth;
- Your phone number and current address;
- A message that conveys your intent to cancel Gold’s Gym membership clearly and in no uncertain terms;
- Your email address;
- Your unique membership number;
- 4 last digits of your credit card – the one that is associated with your Gold’s Gym account.
As with the previous method, it is also highly recommended to confirm that your membership has been canceled by making a phone call to the gym in question no less than two weeks after sending your cancellation form.
There are also two other topics that we can cover here – free trials and refunds. There is a free seven-day pass that you can create for yourself using the Gold’s Gym website. It does not have to receive your credit card information to do that, and this free trial does not transform into a paid membership after expiring.
As for their refund policy, Gold’s Gym has a very specific time frame and a set of very specific rules as their refund policy. Additionally, this rule set can also change depending on the gym in question, which means that confirming your specific case is highly recommended before doing any action such as subscription cancellation. The only rule that seems to be universal in this case is the requirement for the refund that has to happen in the first 30 days after starting your membership.
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