FTC Sues LA Fitness for Making Consumers Sweat Gym Memberships

If you’ve ever needed to get a final signature on a company birthday card at 4:45 on a Friday, perhaps you can relate to the experience many consumers have had trying to cancel their LA Fitness gym memberships.

While consumers can sign up for an LA Fitness gym membership with anyone at the front desk, if they want to cancel their membership, there is only one LA Fitness employee authorized to accept in-person cancellation requests: the Operations Manager, who can be harder to find than Tom from Accounting.

This is just one of the roadblocks the FTC alleges LA Fitness puts up to prevent consumers from canceling gym memberships, according to a complaint filed by the agency last week against the operators of LA Fitness and other gym chains, which together have more than 600 locations and over 3.7 million members in the U.S. As one consumer reported, per the FTC’s lawsuit:

Every time I have attempted to [cancel in person], I have been told that the manager is not available and that there will be a follow-up. Unfortunately, there has never been any followup! This has been a recurring issue and it has left me feeling helpless and frustrated.

But tracking down the Operations Manager is just the final step in the complicated process of canceling an LA Fitness gym membership in-person, according to the complaint, which was filed in California federal court.

First, consumers must log into LA Fitness’ website and print a cancellation form. That may seem simple enough but LA Fitness encourages consumers to use its mobile app, as opposed to its website, to find their nearest gym location, book classes and check in. So many consumers are unfamiliar with the website and as a result, encounter issues navigating the site, if they’re even able to log in.

Moreover, even consumers who have access to the required information cannot set up or reset their login credentials. One consumer reported: “If you don’t have an existing online login, they make you enter your membership info, then say that they’ve sent you an email, but as of the writing of this complaint, I haven’t received that email.”

And while consumers are pushed toward the LA Fitness app, they cannot cancel through the app.

Until at least March 2024, the only alternative to in-person cancellation was canceling by mail, according to the FTC. But consumers still need to log into the LA Fitness website and print the cancellation form. Then instead of going to an LA Fitness location, they must take a trip to the post office and mail the form at their expense.

For years, LA Fitness has “consistently failed to provide a simple cancellation method,” the FTC alleges in its complaint. As a result, consumers have been “illegally charged hundreds of millions of dollars in unwanted recurring fees.” LA Fitness gym memberships range from $30 to $50 a month.

The FTC claims that it wasn’t until the agency informed LA Fitness that it was investigating its restrictive cancellation policies that the company started allowing consumers to cancel directly through the LA Fitness website, but canceling online still imposes “unnecessary burdens on consumers,” such as the login issues noted above.

The agency alleges that such practices violate the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, which, among other things, requires online sellers to provide consumers with a simple way to cancel autorenewing memberships, also known as negative-option offers, and to adequately disclose how to cancel before obtaining consumers’ billing information.

The FTC’s complaint comes only a month after a federal appeals court blocked an amended Negative Option Rule, which contained a “click-to-cancel” provision aimed at making memberships and other types of subscriptions as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. One of the industry arguments opposing the “click-to-cancel” rule was that recurring subscriptions are good for consumers and competition alike. Not here, the FTC said.

Neither the imposition of the exceedingly difficult cancellation methods nor the failure to clearly disclose them is outweighed by benefits to consumers or competition.

The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction to prevent further violations of the law and refunds for consumers.

LA Fitness did not respond to a TINA.org request for comment.

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