Late Cancel/No-Show Policies for Unlimited Members: Here’s What Other Mindbody and Glofox Studios are Doing

If you want to reduce late cancels/no-shows in your business but you’re not sure how, this post will get you started. If you’re currently charging late cancel/no-show fees, this post shares how Bitlancer can automate your policy in both Mindbody and Glofox and help you apply it more consistently.

This post shares my experience and recommendations on late cancel/no-show policies for your “Unlimited” members who come as often as they want for a flat rate. In a follow-on post, I’ll do the same for “limited” or class-pack customers. You should treat them separately, too.

Why charge a late cancel/no-show fee?

No-shows and late cancels cost your fitness business significant money and time, and inconvenience your membership and staff. 

Is financially penalizing your unlimited members who don’t show up for class or cancel at the last minute worth the trouble? Definitely! It motivates and incentivizes members to prioritize their commitment to your studio community. Over the years, we’ve seen decreases in late cancellations and no-shows of about 40% or more on average with late cancel/no-show penalties.

What are the benefits? Increased revenue, increased class attendance and increased time for you and your staff to focus on other things. It’s that simple and that important.

What’s the right late cancel window?

In Mindbody and Glofox, the concept of “late cancel” is a fixed length, rolling time window. Think about that in relation to what time a class starts.

Say you setup a late cancel window of 4 hours. That starts the late cancel clock ticking at 2PM for a 6PM class. Hopefully enough time for another member to claim a spot if someone cancels. But what about your 7AM class? If the late cancel window starts at 3AM, who’s awake then to check if a spot is available or they’ve been added off the wait list?

This is why I recommend that studios figure out their late cancel window based on what works for their morning classes. This is also why the most common late cancel window for our customers is 8 hours. It allows time the night before class to get somebody in an early morning spot. With later morning classes, you still have a few hours before class starts to fill a late-cancel spot. And an 8-hour late cancel window works well for afternoon and evening classes.

Is there a way to setup multiple late cancel windows for morning and evening (or weekday and weekend) classes? It’s can be a little cumbersome, but we’ve helped about 5% of our Mindbody customers through the process.

The importance of consistent policy enforcement

One piece of advice that I always stress is to be consistent with your late cancel/no-show policy. Don’t play favorites — it will quickly cause headaches. Be sure to communicate your policy clearly to members and give your staff guidelines on how to handle complaints and excuses.

Here's a suggestion for what not to do: Don’t try to penalize late cancels and no-shows for only waitlisted classes. It’s not fair to members when you think about it. The person cancelling late won’t even know if they’ll be charged a fee or not.

Plus, you don’t want your staff to be hearing, “Hey, I cancelled at 4PM for a 6PM class and was charged a fee but my friend cancelled at 4:30PM for a 5PM class and wasn’t charged a fee.”

Auto-forgiveness

All that said, of course “life happens” and you’ll want to forgive late cancel or no-show penalties at times. A great way to do that is automatically! The Bitlancer software can automatically forgive one late cancel and/or no-show per member per month, or two for three months, or three per year, or mostly whatever you decide.

What’s great about auto-forgiveness is it’s quick and consistent. One-time judgements get taken out of it. Or as I’ve heard it put, “We don’t want to reward people who are good at making up stories.”

What if our classes never sell out?

If your classes rarely or never fill up, I still recommend you enforce late cancel/no-show penalties. You don’t want someone to cancel 3 minutes before class and not be penalized. It’s not fair to your business or to fellow members.

But a long late-cancel window (like 8 hours or more) is only going to discourage your members from signing up ahead of time for open classes. If they know they can always get into class, they’ll just book at the last minute. So you’ll have less information on class attendance, which makes it harder to prepare.

For studios that don’t need to waitlist classes, try a shorter late cancel window like 2 or 4 hours. The rationale is that you need a decent headcount to ensure you have staff on hand, towels on bikes, etc.

To fee or not to fee

When charging a late cancel/no-show fee, it’s key to be consistent about when and how much you charge. I also recommend making your late cancel fee a lot smaller than your no-show penalty.

Giving the studio notice when you’re not coming is a good deed. Late cancel fees for unlimited members below $10 (even $5) are common among our customers for classes with a drop-in rate around $25.

No-shows warrant a higher fee, up to full rate for a drop-in class pass. That’s the potential amount the business loses when an unlimited member reserves a spot they don’t use.

Extra late cancel

With the Bitlancer software, you also get an extra feature that Mindbody and Glofox don’t offer on their own: an “extra late cancel” fee. This lets you charge a lower fee for people who cancel earlier versus those who cancel closer to class time.

Here’s an example: Your late cancel window starts 8 hours before class. If you cancel from then until 1 hour before class, the fee is $10. Under 1 hour it’s $15. And a no-show is $25.

We built this feature because many clients said, “I have members late canceling 3 minutes before class and paying $8, who if they had just no-showed would’ve paid $25.”

The disadvantage of extra late cancel is it creates a more complex policy that’s harder to communicate. About 25-30% of our Mindbody customers use the feature.

Have questions?

To find out more about automating a custom late cancel/no-show policy in Mindbody or Glofox, send us a message.