How do you price your sessions?

by Angela Reed-Fox

How do you price your indoor cycling classes?

How do you determine what's a fair price for an indoor cycling session? Are you happy with what you're charging?

Pricing is important - get it wrong and you'll either be undervaluing your product or pricing yourself out of the market. Just like with resistance and cadence is in balance on a bike, the level of demand should be balanced by the price you're asking riders to pay. There's a sweet spot for both.

I took a call today from an ICI instructor. He wanted to know: What's a good price to charge? - he's starting to instruct at a different studio; the bikes are quite basic, there are only a handful of riders who can ride at a time, the gym is new, and they offer gym only membership.

What would you do?

You need to focus on what you're actually offering - OK the bikes weren't necessarily top of the range, but if the instructor is good (as ICI instructors are!) then they can help any rider get great results with any bike. Studios will often over-invest in bikes thinking that if they've got the latest tech the classes will be brilliant. But if the instructors don't know what they're doing, that investment's wasted.

The fact that the instructor I spoke to today is well-equipped, knowledgeable and passionate about giving riders the results they want, and that there aren't lots of bikes available in the class means riders are going to be getting a really top-drawer experience. This experience (and the gym's bottom line) could be improved by a small investment in heartrate training - perhaps with the MyZone system which provides extra motivation, retention - and a secondary income stream.

Considering that the gym is seeking to increase interest in the gym by starting to offer indoor cycling sessions but not offer the classes necessarily within the membership, this creates an excellent opportunity. The ICI instructor is contracted by the gym and is incentivised to attract more riders by having a profit share from the classes.

In this instance, it makes sense to have a core price that other offers can be compared with. For example, charging £10 per ride for a non-member, and giving members a discount on this yields two things:

• you have a benchmark - your class is worth £10 - all your offers will relate back to this and this is how riders will quantify how good your offers (and your classes) are
• you reward member loyalty - they pay 50% less (or whatever), this promotes greater loyalty and increases membership sales

By doing this, you're employing the 'First Class' principle. When you buy a first class train ticket you're paying considerably more than the person who buys a regular ticket for the same journey on the same train. Sometimes you pay more than twice as much. But does it cost the train company twice as much to provide that first class seat? Nope. But what happens is the train company is using the revenue from those who pay a higher price to subsidise those who don't. In an indoor cycling setting, those who are not members pay a lot more to ride than those who are, and this helps to provide the excellent experience that the members enjoy (but don't necessarily pay for!) and attract more riders to become members.

Another thing you can think about is selling bundles of rides. Perhaps your newish rider wants to dip their toe in a bit more, but doesn't want to commit to the terms of a membership. In this case you could offer bundles that don't give the saving of a membership, but offer a small discount from a single ride price. Be aware though that anything that's between the 'benchmark' single ride price and what you want riders to go for (loyalty with a membership!) might deter riders from making that decision.

You can also offer several-week programmes - perhaps a 'Little Black Dress' programme or a 'Winter Training Programme' - this would have riders signing up and committing to a particular session for a number of weeks. They pay upfront in one, and pay the same whether they turn up to all classes or not.

If the gym decides to go down the MyZone heartrate training route, there'll be plenty of crossover as members can use it in the fitness suite as well as all of their classes, this will mean more riders to the cycling studio, as well as more riders exploring other parts of the gym - this approach generally works well for improving member experience, building membership base, as well as that always important bottom line.

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