I have had a Bally’s Fitness membership for many years, and I really haven’t had occasion to use it in the last couple. I maintained the membership because Lisa gets a cheaper membership through mine. She hasn’t been going much in the last year, so we decided it was time to cancel it. I looked up the contact information on the website and called the 800 number. After traversing the phone tree, I was told I needed to call a different number. Hmm. Ok, called that number. For the next 20 minutes, I traversed the phone tree trying to find a way to cancel my membership. None of the options applied. Finally out of frustration, I chose one of the cancellation options. After listening to another long list of things I didn’t care about, I was told “Press 1 to speak to a representative”. Ok, sounds good. “Please enter your member number”. Ummm. I don’t know. I can’t remember where I put my card… I entered all zeros. After a few iterations of that, “If you would like to speak to a representative and don’t have your membership number, we will charge you 10.00 for the service.” What?!?? I sat on hold for a few minutes. Hung up. Dug through the drawers upstairs and found the card buried there. Called back and went through the phone tree. Again. Entered the membership number. Immediately got a real person, which was odd considering there were “extended delays” when I had called just a few minutes ago. Told her I wanted to cancel. She asked why. “I don’t go”. Long pause. “We offer a service to maintain your membership on hold for $4 a month”. I just wanted to cancel. I was then informed I had to “mail a request to the central office stating that I wanted to cancel my membership”. What??! An hour of my life was eaten up in this process. I bet they are going to charge me to cancel too.
A few things were obvious from this experience:
- Bally’s doesn’t make it easy to talk to a real customer service person.
- They go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to cancel a membership.
- They really don’t care about their customers.
- I won’t recommend them to ANYONE based on this experience.
#1 by Ted on March 17, 2010 - 6:33 am
Jonny,
Lets see, every company is like that.. Well most big companies, I like verizon, go into store 10 people to help you BUY a phone, come back next day with problem ,wait in line for the 1or 2 service reps. to help fix the problem.Now if you called to sign up at Bally’s do you have to send a letter to corprate? I googled Bally complaints and quitting was one of the tops.
#2 by Caroline on December 21, 2010 - 3:03 am
that and their return policy on personal training packages it total bull shit even if you have a medical problem that you were diagnosed with after purchasing.
#3 by Anita on January 17, 2012 - 11:11 pm
I had the same problem. It was actually much harder than you described a few years back. I finally got the whole thing resolved by going through my credit card company. I told them that I refused to be charged and, after a couple of months, the charges stopped. Good luck!