Fitness Park Case Study: Modernising The Gym Experience

With a network of 234 gyms across Europe, Fitness Park opened in 2009 with the first low-cost gym model in France. The budget operator offers competitive pricing with ample space and equipment for members. Fitness Park has expanded into Spain, Portugal and other nations, with plans to soon operate in Morocco. The fitness club network has recently been voted best fitness brand in France by the French magazine Capital for the last two years running; the club in Madrid was also voted best club in Spain by Men’s Health Magazine.

Over the last three years, Fitness Park has transformed its business to deliver a higher calibre of fitness experience under the same low price. As well as offering fitness programmes to suit everyone. Even though they were making moves, they remained true to their priorities: 

• Digitise their experience using a modern IT architecture
• Build the best community experience

For inspiration, Fitness Park researched boutique fitness studio examples in London and the US. And, set out to design new styles of programmes under the same trusted brand. New concepts launched included FightPark (for boxing, martial arts, and more), BurningPark (for high-intensity, fast-paced workouts) and CyclePark (for spinning and cycle workouts).

This transition was also a perfect time to experiment with new equipment,instructors, gamification techniques and technology options. Technology proved to be the greatest pain point of all.

“Before adopting Xplor Gym, Fitness Park was operating with disparate software in each gym and old architecture. We didn’t have a single view of how our sites were operating, couldn’t offer customers a seamless mobile booking experience, or consistent levels of service across our gyms. Employees had to spend a lot of time reconciling data from different sources for reporting, doing manual tasks like data entry/processing gym access/payments, rather than focusing on engaging with members.” - Thomas Mendonça, Director General Digital and Innovation, Fitness Park.

With +700,000 members in their system, Fitness Park’s migration to Xplor Gym was the biggest business software migration project ever undertaken in the European Union. To successfully migrate everything correctly and securely, Fitness Park employed a team of five engineers to manage the project alongside the Xplor Gym team. 

These engineers collaborated with Xplor Gym’s Go-Live team to replace hardware for contactless gym access, install software to automate manage all digitised processes, and prime Fitness Park for success upon launching with Xplor Gym.

Read the full case study here.