In my Lisburn Puregym review I mentioned that I'd gotten access to Boucher for a while. This gym is…read moreactually more mismanaged than Lisburn.
The gym has lots of space and lots of equipment, but the idiocy of how it's mismanaged is mind-boggling.
First off, I think the manager has it pretty easy. People are flocking to gyms in their droves, so Puregym HQ probably thinks this means that a great job is being done. It isn't. There are the stupid things, e.g. clocks go back in autumn and they don't get changed in the gym. A few days later, one clock gets changed. A day after that, another gets changed...it's six days later before all are changed. Why?? You might think it's the PTs' job, but they are self-employed, and not employees of the gym in the traditional sense, so as far as I can tell it's up to the manager.
Then we have the water fountain breaking down. I'm amazed a gym of this size only has one water station. I'm more amazed to discover that, legally, a gym isn't required to have one (I'm sure this legislation will change when someone collapses of dehydration). Even more amazing is that it takes around five days to get this fixed. But, hey, when you're a manager who is being measured against targets and profitability, why would you get it fixed when you're now selling an extra £100 worth off water per day out of the machine? There is no excuse for that not being fixed within 24 hours. And this is not a one-off occurrence.
Interesting, though, that when there were rumours of multiple people using one PIN (i.e. two people paying one fee between them), there were immediately posters up on the entrance asking members to report any such abuse - there was no time wasted there! (Nothing to do with my situation of being from Lisburn but using Boucher, by the way - for the whole time I used Boucher my friend exclusively used Lisburn, so there was no disadvantage to PureGym.)
It's clear that the sole priority for the manager is not the customers - if it's not an issue about making more money then it's not an issue at all here.
I can't decide which of the next two issues takes the biscuit. The first issue is of studio classes being scheduled immediately after each other, e.g. if a class ends at 6pm you cannot start the subsequent class at 6pm. It's not possible, and it's idiotic to think otherwise. Aside from the fact that people at the first class have to leave before people at the subsequent class can enter, studio classes have equipment that needs brought out. I have seen a class scheduled for 6pm not start until after 6.10pm. It's a total joke.
It turns out that many customers have raised this with instructors, and one instructor (who left shortly after) told me that they had repeatedly raised this with the manager, whose reply was...wait for it...'that's the way the classes have always been scheduled'. So if an idea is stupid or doesn't work, keep doing it because it's always been done like that? There's some 21st century business leadership right there. The instructors started encouraging customers to fill in feedback cards because the manager would constantly ignore their appeals and, eventually, one or two of the classes were changed.
But here's the other issue. Classes which are very popular end up getting replaced with other classes for no good reason. I'm not talking about PTs covering classes for each other. I'm talking about the manager looking at a popular class and thinking, 'I'll just change that class and the instructor, and people will still come.' People will not. Most instructors in this gym, from what I can tell, are good instructors (and would do a much better job managing the gym). There are exceptions, of course. One instructor went into a class they were covering and asked if those in attendance wanted to do a 30-minute class as opposed to the scheduled 45-minute class. There's dedication for you. That instructor seems to have diminished the attendance levels at several classes significantly, but it doesn't seem like anyone is really bothering to look at the numbers.
Class times also seem to get changed on a whim. I've never been aware of any research done by the gym to ask members if a class should be moved, either to a different time or a different day, yet this happens even with very popular classes.
PureGym HQ really needs to find a regional manager who understands (and can be bothered to read) data to oversee Boucher and Lisburn. If I find any friends who are members of the other PureGyms in Belfast, I'll swap PINs and hopefully get those reviewed. Surely they couldn't be as mismanaged as Lisburn and Boucher, could they?
