A fitness franchise cut trial no-shows to 4% with three touches before the session

Most studios keep the trial as easy to book as they can, because the people who book one are mostly cold leads, and a cold lead who meets any friction doesn't book. This franchise sells personal attention. For every trial a trainer's hour is held for one person, one-on-one, and nobody else can book that hour, so a trial nobody comes to is expensive. As the head of the franchise put it:

The trouble is that a trial that is easy to book is also easy to forget. People book, it isn't their priority, and they don't come. As the head of the franchise put it, "usually people don't make a big deal out of it." The usual ways to make people value a trial, such as raising its price, add the very friction that keeps cold leads from booking. So the franchise had a contradiction to solve: keep booking as easy as it was, and bring the no-shows down at the same time.

If you run a studio where every trial takes a trainer's hour, you have weighed the same two things.

When a person actively confirms that they'll come, they are much less likely to stay away. This was confirmed in the research by Martin et al. in 2012: in two UK GP practices, having patients write down their own appointment details cut missed appointments by 18%. So the question we set ourselves was how to get that active yes from every person who books a trial, without adding a step before the booking.

The answer is WhatsApp. In the Netherlands it is where the family chats are, so people open it and read it, and a message there isn't taken for spam, unlike email, which not everyone reads or answers (78% of Dutch people aged 15 and over use WhatsApp every day, Newcom, Nationale Social Media Onderzoek 2026). A WhatsApp message also feels personal. When a message that reads like it came from a person asks "could you confirm?", people write back "yes", and a yes you wrote yourself is harder to go back on.

When someone books a trial, a WhatsApp message goes out with the session details and a payment link made in Virtuagym. Each message after it adapts to whether the person has paid and replied, and steers them towards an active confirmation.

People who have paid are asked to confirm too, since a payment made days earlier is easy to forget as well. Anyone who can't come writes back in the same thread, and our AI assistant on WhatsApp moves or cancels the booking (see what else it can do in our case on member questions).

With three touches before each trial, the franchise now has almost no trial no-shows. The commitment the messages get from people holds, and only 4% of trial bookings end in a no-show, compared with double digits before.

What we didn't expect was who the 4% are. They never reply to any of the messages, and in practice everyone who confirms shows up. So when someone doesn't react to the messages, the franchise can be fairly sure they won't come. Silence has become an early signal, and a booking that stays silent the day before is one to follow up on, or a slot the location could free for someone else.

For the staff, fewer calls about payment and fewer links made by hand. For the business, a trial hour that has been paid for and confirmed is one a location can plan around. For the person booking, the address, the parking and what to bring arrive in the app they already use, and moving the session takes one message.