Anytime Fitness - DCA Letter never received a warning or notice

[ScuL]

Basic summary;

 

• Have been member for nearly 2 years so well beyond the minimum 12 month period
  
• Club decided to raise fees by significant amount in February combined with T&C change
  
• My attendance has gone down due to a new job with a lengthy commute and I cannot allocate the time required to go to the gym
  
• Hence I wrote to the club 1 day after the change in T's & C's and price to cancel membership
  
• My mail requesting cancellation was not handled nor confirmed
  
• Contacted bank and cancelled direct debit
  
• Weeks go by and suddenly I get a text stating my account is in arrears
  
• I phone up and club manager states I owe them 2 months of membership fees
  
• I challenge his comments as to my knowledge, according to European law, when a company changes their terms & conditions or price the consumer needs to acknowledge and agree to these changes and if the consumer disagrees with the changes there should be an option to cancel the contract, which I have done
  
• Club states that they can change T's & C's and prices as much as they like when beyond the 12 month period regardless whether consumer agrees
  
• We can not come to an arrangement and after his repetitive denial I hang up
  
• Weeks go by again, no news, no invoices, no letters nothing
  
• Today I received a DCA letter stating "FINAL DEMAND" sent by Daniels Silverman Ltd. stating that I owe them x amount + fees and need to pay asap to prevent court action & bailiffs
  
• Please note again that I have not received ANY normal request/communication stating notices, reminders or invoices from the club
  
• Anytime Fitness HQ (which would be my next port of call) simply refuses to handle membership fee issues as on their website they state: "As each club is independently owned and operated, please contact your home club if you have a membership billing question. Use the Club Locator to find their contact information."
  

I am fully aware that 9 out of times these letters consist of empty threats and bullying in order to scare people into paying but I would like to clarify my stance in terms of my legal position

 

 

Purely out of principle I refuse to give way, I did not agree to their new terms, I have cancelled my membership accordingly, notified them in a timely manner, I have not used their services since nor should I be paying for them.

 

If it matters, the total charge is well under £100. In my personal expectation it seems unlikely they will take this to court?

 

 

Thoughts?

[dx100uk]

no they don't do court

 

its a bluff.and hotnair.

[slick132]

Hi ScuL and welcome to CAG

 

It looks like you did everything properly and you had every right to cancel if you didn't want to pay the increased amount.

 

You were not tied in to a minimum period as you were well past the initial 12 months.

 

The price rise is actually irrelevant and you were free to cancel at any time. However, you may have been wise to give them the normal one month's notice and cancelled AFTER paying one further fee.

 

Write to Daniel Silverman and say the matter is in clear dispute and any further demands from them will be reported to the relevant authorities.

 

Write to the gym and, if you feel my point about a further month's fee for the notice period is relevant, offer them this subject to their acceptance within 14 days. See my draft letter here and use the "acceptance within 14 days" and the "full settlement of all amounts payable" bits in your own letter - http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?423522-Classic-CRS-antics&p=4526645&viewfull=1#post4526645

 

Also add that any admin charges are actually unlawful penalties and will not be paid.

 

Regardless of the amount involved, gyms and their admin companies tend NOT to litigate in such cases, probably because they know they haven't a legal leg to stand on. Also, gyms do not use CRA's these days to report gym m/ship "debts".

 

[BankFodder]

Just to add to Slick's advice. I would tell them that the matter is beyond dispute. You have done everything so correctly, that any attempts to get more money from you in these circumstances would pretty well amount to some kind of extortion.

 

What a disreputable industry the gym industry is.

[ScuL]

Hey guys thanks very much for your advice.

 

I have done some research about the DCA in question and on various websites they're instructing me not to try and communicate with them. As soon as you send something their way (or attempt to phone them) they know that their communication is reaching you and they will step up their harassment game with more feeble threats. Therefore I will write an e-mail directly to the club and ignore the DCA for now.

 

I have prepared a spicy e-mail sent directly to the club repeating my request to terminate my membership and cease communicating about the matter. Let's see what happens next.

 

You're quite right about your comment on the gym industry, I had no idea they were money scroungers of this kind.

[ScuL]

Hi,

 

I received an e-mail from the club today

 

Many thanks for your email. To confirm, you entered into a contractual agreement with Anytime Fitness for the minimum term set out in your contract. By entering into this contract you subsequently agreed to all the terms and conditions set out in that contract which stipulate that at the end of your contractual period in order to close down the membership you must provide written confirmation to request that the membership is closed down and then the club will close down the direct debit with the 4 week notice period (typically meaning that there is 1 final membership owed) as outlined in the terms and conditions.

You breached that contract by cancelling the direct debit instruction without authorisation from the club and as such fell into arrears of 1 month. To confirm on the 7/4/14 I personally called you to resolve the matter and you unfortunately decided to put the phone down during that conversation.

Regarding your communication, this does not constitute the closing down of the membership which I tried explaining during the aforementioned telephone conversation.

To close down the membership officially the club require one final payment owed on your membership and the matter will then be resolved. You can make this payment by calling the office on *snip*. Alternatively if you would prefer for one of the sales team to call you at a convenient time I am happy to arrange for that instead?

 

 

In short, they're still trying to enforce the 30-day payment term for which I have not taken up any service nor do I see it as legally enforceable. It's a private term thought up by a company, I can claim as much as grass being purple in T's & C's but it won't hold in court.

I have not offered to pay this term as I find it unreasonable. I have completed the minimum contract term and see fit to terminate the contract as and when I please, certainly after a changes of T&C's and a price increase.

There's absolutely no intention from my side to make any further payments.

 

 

Secondly they conclude that my cancellation letter wasn't sufficient for their records which I contest.

 

 

PS: he is lying because he didn't call me I called him

[slick132]

Hi ScuL,

 

It doesn't matter if you used the gym or not during the 30 day notice period.

 

It's reasonable that you give 30 days notice and make the DD payment that falls within that period.

 

You'll see from my numerous posts on gym threads that I am not one to back down when fighting gyms and their practices. However, my objective advice is that you owe the final month's fee and, if you don't pay it, they will continue to make what I deem to be reasonable demands.

 

Your cancellation letter was certainly an adequate means of cancelling. In fact, a letter, email, phone call or face-to-face conversation would all suffice although one is always better with a written letter, preferably with a signature for receipt.