The Gym London Ealing

They say you get what you pay for but when you pay for something that’s not being provided it is rather irksome. The Gym in Ealing opened its door on 9^th November 2011 amidst lots of hype about being open 24 hours and costing only £15.99 a month. What a bargain one would think. Well it would be if they did actually open for 24 hours of the day as promised. I signed up a month before they opened determined to get fit. I don’t need a gym to be open 24 as I’m not likely to be visiting at 2am or even at 11pm but this gym advertised as being available for use 24 hours a day is only open from 7am till 10pm and this has been the case for weeks, I have already heard several people complain about the reduced opening hours. If you pay £16.99 instead of £15.99 you can access other branches of The Gym across the UK which is handy if you live near one and work near another.
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Everything is done online from booking inductions to getting access to your PIN number, an 8 digit code you need to enter to access the premises. The equipment is new and in decent working order. The induction leaves a LOT to be desired. A young woman who could barely speak English gave us a less than the promised 30 minute induction, didn’t actually demonstrate the use of any of the equipment herself but made the inductees hop on and ask them to show the others how it was done, except 2 of us had never used the equipment or a gym before and were a bit lost! There was no information given about warmup exercises, only half a dozen pieces of equipment were shown, the rest you just have to figure out yourselves. Yes, you do get what you pay for but I expected a bit better.
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The changing rooms are clean and of course have showers, a communical changing area and several toilets and 100 or so lockers. Outside the changing rooms and by the front of the gym are more lockers, you need to bring your own padlock. I’ve only used the lockers outside the changing rooms as from what I’ve been told, locker break ins are very common in gyms, so I’m not risking it
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On one visit, there were bits of the ceiling hanging off and the area beneath was sectioned off. On one visit almost ¹⁄₅^th of the gym had been sectioned off. I don’t know what the situation would be when it’s peak time, say between 6−8pm when it’s really busy but so far at off peak times the gym is about half full.
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So far I have had to email the gym twice with queries and as the first one was over a week ago, I’m very disappointed not to have heard anything back at all. The website, once you log in, is supposed to be highly interactive, you can monitor your attendance (well in theory), e.g. I had been 4 times in a and only 2 of those were showing.
UPDATE
It seems the website takes some time to update the info about your attendance although it showed later visits there is still a visit of 90 minutes or so missing from my first week.
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The gym is still not open 24 hours and we’ve now been sent emails about the reduced opening hours over the Christmas and New Year period. I’m sure people must be leaving in droves or those who tried it out briefly whilst still with their old gym must be cancelling their memberships. I’ll keep updating this as time goes on. As it stands, I’m still unable to change my rating to more than 3 out of 5 stars.
UPDATE Nov 2013
Hiccups with The Gym include emails not being sent when the gym is going to be closed which makes it quite annoying when you turn up there to see a sign saying it’s closed until the next day. They say you should check the site but who can be bothered to check before they attend the gym whether or not it’s going to be open when it’s supposed to be available ²⁴⁄₇? Email notificitions are rather sporadic and email tips seem to stop working if you don’t attend the gym for a week or so which is ridiculous as you’re still paying the full price.
As I don’t trust gyms to leave my bag in the lockers inside the changing rooms I use the lockers outside where I can see them. Lots of lockers are damaged and they don’t seem to bother getting these fixed. Also the price has gone up £1 a month for newer members.