LA Fitness Misleading Terms, Deception, Hassle, Harassment, Misuse of Personal Data Irvine California
I am writing to register a formal complaint against several LA Fitness business practices encountered during my membership period. These include misleading terms, out-right lies, harassment, and inappropriate uses of personal data.
1.Free Trial Pass: When I arrived at a Tucson LA Fitness gym to use the free pass I'd printed from the website, I was required to sit with a sales representative for an orientation first. Before the representative would tell me anything about the gym, he tried to collect considerable personal information about me: name, date of birth, address, weight, age, health information. He also insisted that I sign a release of liability before he would give me a tour of the gym.
I refused to give the personal information, explaining that I knew nothing about the gym and was uncomfortable sharing this data until I knew more. I protested about the release of liability but was eventually coerced into signing it in order to find out any information about the gym.
The Free Trial Pass proved to be nothing more than an opportunity for the gym to give a lengthy sales pitch and collect personal data about me.
2.Membership Initiation: When I signed up for the membership, I was promised two perks that proved to be deceptive.
a.Free 2-week Pass for my son: On the first day that I arrived with my son to use this pass, I was
told, Actually, passes aren't issued to children under the age of 18. I responded that it was a condition of my membership initiation. I was told, It is not possible. My son was allowed to use the gym that day only.
b.Two free 60 minute sessions with a Trainer: These turned out to be sales pitches rather than training sessions. The person giving the training again tried to collect personal data, requiring me to stand on a scale. If this information were useful for training, I would have been more comfortable. I was uncomfortable because the information was only used to tailor the sales pitch. The actual training consisted of lifting a couple of free weights for about 10 minutes, with no commentary about proper form or purpose of the particular exercise.
3.Billing: Two family members and two friends joined the gym within a month of my initiation. For some reason, our records were linked in a way that could never be untangled. Under my account were listed my husband and one of my friends. My friend's husband was listed separately on his own account. My son was listed under a third person. This meant that our credit card and payment information was scattered across all these accounts in the same way. So, I was billed for the friend listed on my account. And my son's bill was sent to the third person. After several attempts to remedy this, the bills were eventually charged to the correct credit cards, but the record structure could not be altered.
4.Change of Payment: For about two weeks, I received calls from all over the country by people claiming to work for LA Fitness and asking me for new credit card information. Several times I told the callers, I will address this situation with my local gym because I am not willing to give credit card information over the phone. I asked them to please not call again.
The last person to call me identified herself as from LA Fitness. She said she had my account information in front of her. She asked if I'd recently had my credit card lost or stolen. I indicated that I would not reveal personal financial information over the phone and that I would sort out the issue with my local gym. I indicated that I'd been called several times about this and it was starting to feel like harassment. I asked her to please stop calling. She became belligerent and threatening. She said the calls would continue until the issue was resolved.
After explaining repeating that I would not give her any credit card information over the phone, I eventually became exasperated and said, Aright, I will resolve this issue right now. Please cancel my membership. She refused. I repeated, Please stop calling me, please cancel my membership. And she continued threatening, The calls will not stop and you cannot cancel your membership over the phone. Finally, I said, I would like to file a formal complaint about this phone call, please tell me your name. She immediately hung up on me.
Because this seemed so much like fraud or attempted identity theft, I sifted through my caller ID, found the phone number from which I'd been called: 661-294-0985. Calling it, I repeated my request to know her name. She identified herself as Keri at a gym in California, but refused to give a last name. I asked to speak to her manager. She replied that she was the manager. I asked for the name of a supervisor, and she gave me the name of Scott Legg.
I went to my local gym to ask about all this. I sorted out the confusion about my credit card. The woman at my local gym explained that the LA Fitness computer system presents employees with the same call list and account information. Since they make calls from the same list, they cannot tell if a particular customer is receiving numerous calls at the same time.
5.Membership cancellation: The only way to cancel a membership, according to several employees and managers, is to go in person to a local gym, request a printed form, and mail it to a corporate office elsewhere. If the form is post-marked less than 20 days before the next billing cycle, the customer will be charged for another full month.
I was advised to send it registered mail. Apparently, it is common for LA Fitness to dispute the receipt of cancellation requests. By using registered mail, I would have proof that I'd sent it in.
In my opinion, going to the local gym and asking to cancel should be sufficient.
After all these difficulties, we decided to cancel our memberships with LA Fitness. The manner in which LA Fitness conducts business includes several practices which are deceptive, coercive, harassing, hassling, and uncomfortable, and in some cases cannot be distinguished from potential fraud. I felt that the company was primarily interested in extracting every possible dollar from me, and not very interested in providing me with a positive service. We would prefer to work with a company that conducts itself with integrity and that offers services that can be identified with accurate names.
Sv
Tucson, Arizona
U.S.A.
Click here to read other Rip Off Reports on LA Fitness Body of Change
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Dart
N Miami Bch,Florida,
U.S.A.
My apologies for a bad experience.
#2UPDATE Employee
Sat, February 28, 2009
Hello, I am very sorry to hear of your negative experiences with LA Fitness. I myself am an LA Fitness employee who has a few things to share with all readers, including my opinions and the knowledge I've gained working with LA Fitness.
As far as guest passes do go, a guess pass does go hand-in-hand with the sales department, as the pass allows an individual to get a feel for the gym and decide whether to purchase a membership or not. A potential guest MUST be 18 years of age to use a guest pass, this is LA Fitness policy across the board. I apologize if LA Fitness employees gave you incorrect information, but the 18 years of age policy is for liability reasons, should a minor be injured in one of our facilities. Passes ARE activated by a sales representative, as the guest will be working with that particular representative should they decide to eventually sign up. Activating a guest pass does NOT bind you to signing up, and a guest has their own decision whether or not to start a membership with us.
Our membership database is another story. Our infrastructure binds memberships together that have been created at the same time, or if a new member's membership is created and added on to the primary member's account. This does not mean that the billing on these accounts needs to be the same. Billing information takes about maybe a minute to change on an account, and can be done at a member's discretion at any point in time, with the new account being automatically billed each monthly cycle until another change it made, or the membership is cancelled.
When our billing company attempts to bill an individual and the EFT provided comes back as declined, the member's account is placed on a billing problem status. This status places the account on a nationwide calling list for LA Fitness employees nationwide. We try to note accounts when we call them as to avoid meaningless calls and harrassment to our customers, but sometimes things do not go according to plan. Unfortunately, this results in the mass calls an individual may receive until the account returns to good standing. As for rudeness of LA Fitness employees in these calls, I cannot give an excuse for this as rudeness in business is never warranted in my opinion and I myself strive for customer satisfation. Do realize however, the size of LA Fitness as an entity and the number of employees we have will unfortunately bring some of which are not as proficient in dealing with customers properly as others. This is true in any business, as many do know.
As far as cancellation procedure goes, this is commonly a communication problem upon signing up. The LA Fitness membership agreement does include our cancellation policy, which is the cancellation form that is mentioned in this report. The sales representative may have not clearly explained the agreement in some cases, which results in not knowing some of our policies. In truth, the cancellation form is the only way to cancel your membership. As with any company, alternatives do exist higher up the chain, but for the most part, any other form of cancellation is not possible, especially not at the club level. We do suggest always sending the form in certified, due to the reason that for any number of reasons the form may be lost in the mail and our corporate office may not receive it. This may result in additional billings and we cannot do anything if we do not have a postmarked date of a form being sent in.
I do not work for Pro Results, but I believe I can shed some light on the situation regarding training orientations. A training orientation, like a guest pass, is used for the member to try it out and see if they would like to purchase training sessions with a trainer. As such, the training orientation is partially a gauge of your expectations, your statistics such as weight, body-fat, etc. The trainer giving the orientation will also give you some sampling of the training involved, but you cannot expect to receive an entire workout, since it is merely an orientation. Members with a training membership with their trainer receive these, as it is a service that must be paid for. Again, personal information gained in both these orientations and sales representative orientations are not a binding contract of you purchasing either service, they are simply there to log you into our system, and in the case of personal training, they are there to keep track of your goals should you decide to purchase personal training.
I hope this information has been useful in clearing away doubts. We are not by any means a company trying to prey on our customers, rip off our customers, or any of the like. I can definitely tell you from personal experience, we try to make our customers satisfied with their service, but this is not a flawless endeavor. Each employee is their own person, and while they follow the direction of LA Fitness, they still use their own judgement.