Late Cancel/No-Show Policies in Mindbody and Glofox, Part 2: Here’s How to Handle “Class Pack” Members

As I pointed out in a recent post, a policy plus some automation to charge a fee for no-shows and late cancels can save your fitness business significant money and time, while reducing hassles for your members and staff.

The prior post focused on recommendations for your members who pay a flat/subscription rate and attend “unlimited” classes. This current post does the same for your “class pack” customers who pay upfront for a limited number of classes.

Taking away a class

When class-pack customers late cancel or don’t show up for a class, as a default starting point in Mindbody they lose that class from their prepaid class total. In Glofox, customers on credit based memberships will also lose a class.

To keep things simple, I recommend that for class-pack late cancels, don’t add on any additional fees. Losing the class is penalty enough!

But for no-shows, it’s reasonable to charge a nominal no-show fee (e.g., $5) on top of them losing their class. This balances out the difference between their discounted class rate and the drop-in class rate. Because they didn’t tell you they weren’t coming, you weren’t able to sell their spot to someone else at full price. Bitlancer’s unique extra late cancel feature can help even more by letting you charge late cancels close to class time a no-show fee.

Giving back a class

Besides just taking away a class from someone’s 5- or 10-class package when they late cancel or no-show, our Bitlancer software for Mindbody gives you the ability to sell them a new class instead.

Say Jane has 4 classes left in her 5-class package. Then she signs up for a class and late cancels. Typically, she’d be down to 3 classes. But with Bitlancer, you can charge Jane a late cancel fee that’s close to the full-price cost of the class, while at the same time adding a class back to her class pack.

This feature gives you the option to offer people more time at the studio and hopefully engage more, rather than seeing them less because they lost a class. Plus, you can sell an additional class.

But “giving back a class” does add some complexity to your process, your policy and your communications with members and staff.

What other studios are doing

Currently, about 80% of Bitlancer’s Mindbody and Glofox customers are charging a fee only to their unlimited members who late cancel or no-show. Class-pack members are penalized by simply losing a class.

The other 20% of our Mindbody and Glofox customers are handling late cancels and no-shows for their class-pack members by just charging a no-show fee or by using the “give back a class” feature when available.

Have questions?

To find out more about automating a custom late cancel/no-show policy, visit Bitlancer for Mindbody or Bitlancer for Glofox.