LA Fitness Joining Is Easy, Leaving Is Difficult, Bank Account Is Emptied. Irvine California

LA Fitness has their salespeople leave "free workout" cards in nearby local businesses, like many exercise chains. And like many, that "free" trial is preceded by an arduous, confusing hard-sell sesion with that salesperson to sign on the dotted line for membership before any workout.

For your convenience, they also allow you to sign up and provide billing information online.

Do not make the mistake of joining, and certainly do not provide your bank account information. Why?

Because while you can sign up online and at their nearest gym, you can only terminate your membership by sending a form that must be picked up (after being printed personally for you) at that gym and mailed - not emailed, mailed - and that must be done several weeks before the next scheduled automatic bank withdrawal or credit card billing (which is an advance for the next month, of course). Not surprisingly, somehow the post office must manage to lose all their mail, since after three mailings (one of them certified mail) they still kept withdrawing from my bank account. Even after informing several different salespeople conducting follow-up calls (don't give them your phone number either) that I'd sent cancellation several times - none of them passed the word.

Finally, I put a stop payment on all LA Fitness billings to my Bank of America checking account - to the tune of $30 or so in bank fees - and thought I'd seen the end of them. But, no. They knew they'd been blocked from billing, so they used another account name/number and proceeded to keep billing me. It took a formal filing with Bank of America and I still didn't catch this billing tactic in time to reverse all their charges. At least BofA didn't charge me another stop payment fee.

While slippery sales and billing tactics aren't new to the fitness industry (I've worked in equipment marketing over the years), I haven't encountered anything so boldly scandalous as LA Fitness in my 30+ years. Simply put, they make it easy to join and nearly impossible to resign.

Oh, don't bother calling that customer service number on their website, no one answers. Stop by their corporate headquarters? They don't put a street address on their website. What are they hiding? Well, now you know. These guys are the worst of the worse, the kind of old school fitness club scamming that I thought was run out of the industry years ago. But LA Fitness is a trip back in time, to the days before websites like this one could expose them.

Marketer
Encinitas, California
U.S.A.