From Compliance to Confidence: Building Member Journeys That Actually Work
Think about the last time a member cancelled.
Not a friendly “I’m moving away” cancellation, but a messy one. A text message you didn’t reply to fast enough. A direct debit that ran for another two months after someone said they’d left. Or the reverse: a member who joined on a rolling contract and had no idea it was renewing until the payment appeared on their bank statement.
Most gym owners have been there. It’s rarely deliberate, and it’s usually the result of processes that were set up quickly, years ago, and never really revisited.
That’s about to matter more.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (the DMCCA) is introducing new legal requirements for subscription-based businesses, with a confirmed implementation deadline in Spring 2027. Gyms and fitness clubs fall squarely within scope. The headline obligations are around auto-renewals, cancellation processes, and making sure members have a genuine opportunity to leave without being made to jump through hoops.
In plain terms: if you roll someone’s membership over without a heads-up, that’s going to be a problem. If your cancellation process requires a phone call but your sign-up process is online, that’s going to be a problem. If a member can’t find a straightforward way to end their membership, regulators are going to take a dim view of it.
None of which, honestly, should change much for operators who are already running a clean member journey.
It’s not time to reinvent the wheel
That’s the thing about this kind of legislation. It doesn’t invent new standards. It just enforces the ones that good businesses already follow. The gyms that will find 2027 difficult are the ones that have been quietly hoping nobody looks too closely at their renewal emails, their cancellation processes, or the gap between what a new member is promised and what they actually experience in the first few weeks.
For everyone else, this is a useful prompt to look at the whole journey with fresh eyes. Not because of the regulation, but because a member journey that’s clear and honest from sign-up to cancellation is also one that retains people for longer. The easiest members to keep are the ones who felt respected early on, when joining was simple, communication made sense, and they could see exactly what they were paying for and why.
Renewal communication is probably the biggest area where independent gyms have room to improve. Automated renewal reminders, sent a reasonable time before a payment runs, aren’t just a compliance requirement. They’re a retention touchpoint. A well-timed “here’s what’s included in your membership next month” email does more for retention than a discount ever will.
The same logic applies to what happens when someone does want to leave. Making it easy doesn’t mean you lose them faster. It means that when they’ve sorted out the childcare, or recovered from the injury, or got past the worst of January, they think of your gym first.
Spring 2027 gives independent operators a genuine window to get ahead of this rather than scramble when it arrives. Twelve to eighteen months is enough time to look properly at how members join, what happens in the first few weeks, how renewals are communicated, and what the cancellation process actually looks like end to end. Not as a compliance project. As a business one.
We’re going to be talking through exactly this at Elevate on 18th June. Our session on the Generate Stage at 2pm brings together ClubRight’s CEO & Founder Wayne Heath, ClubRight’s Head of Customer Experience Paul Jouanny and David Avgi, CEO of Unipaas.
The conversation is practical and it’s about the member journey as much as it is about the regulation. If you’re at Elevate, it’s worth an hour of your Thursday afternoon. And if you want to talk through where ClubRight fits into all of this, you’ll find us on stand D63.
ClubRight is the go-to gym management software that takes care of everything from managing memberships and billing to class bookings and online joining – plus a whole lot more. Give us a call today on +44 (0)203 884 977 or book a free online demo with one of our product experts to find out why we’re trusted by more than 1000+ fitness businesses across the UK.