Good Points
Cheaper than most

Bad Points
Always too busy during peak hours, pushy personal trainers. Woeful customer services. Hard to cancel.

General Comments

Where to start? My wife and I joined Fitness First in Poole because they were cheaper than our last gym and nearer to home. Gym itself is OK, although very busy at peak times (problems parking, packed changing areas etc.). As mentioned above, personal trainers will hound you to get you to sign up for their sessions, which can get annoying when you are trying to just do your work-out.

However, it's the cancellation process that will kill you with stress, and I'm taking the time to post this here to warn others.

We got fed up with it after a while, and before long, found we had not been for 6 months (a familiar story with gym memberships), so decided to cancel. Went to the gym in person towards the end of the month, only to be told there was nobody available to fill in the cancellation forms with us, and to come back another day. Returned on 2nd of the following month (a few days later) and successfully cancelled. However, as someone else has already posted, if you cancel at the start of the month, you end up having to pay two months membership and not the one month they quote (although we weren't told this at the time). So the girl that told us to "come back another day" cost us an extra months membership.

Cancelled direct debit after they'd taken one months money, thinking we'd paid our dues, and then started getting threatening letters in the post. Phoned their customer services people 3 or 4 times and got nowhere (they tell you have you deal with your local club, and promise someone will phone you to discuss, but they never do). I also wrote them a letter a month ago asking for them to explain how it was my fault that they wouldn't accept our cancellation prior to the end of the previous month. Had no reply.

Finally, today, got another automated letter threatening to pass my account on to a credit collection agency, which would "incur extra charges". Phoned again and had a 20 minute argument with a call centre robot who kept quoting "the terms of our contract..." and telling me that it was my word against their word and so on. On the occasions I phoned them, I learned some interesting things:

Your cancellation will possibly not officially be accepted until the local club has sent the paperwork to head office. So if you cancel on say 25 March, but the club sit on the paperwork until start of April, you presumably pay an extra month.

Despite the fact they were quite happy to send me letters demanding I contacted them within 7 days, they said that although they acknowledge receipt of the letter I had sent them nearly a month ago, it had not yet been read due to a mail backlog. In the time it would take them to open, read and reply to your letter, the bailiffs would be in.

You cannot argue with them. If you ask to be put through to a supervisor, you're told it won't do any good.

I explained that my wife, who joined and left Fitness First on the same day as me, had not been chased for payment. Was told along the lines of well if you'd like, I'll open up her file and find out whether we should be chasing her too.

So they took 6 months money off of us with neither one of us setting foot in the gym. Which is bad enough (but never the less our fault). But to then take another 2 months money for doing nothing at all?

Ended up paying the £26 they wanted just to avoid the possibility of them multiplying my account by a factor of their choice when sending in the credit collection agency. However, intend to keep fighting.

All in all, organisations that hide behind the small print of their contract, and refuse to enter into any dialog when you've been misinformed, should be avoided at all costs. The hassle and stress you will have in cancelling your membership far outweighs any benefits of going to the gym.

Would instead recommend Holmes Place (our previous gym) which had a much nicer ambience and better facilities, even if was a bit more expensive.