Discovery Vitality Virgin Active Activation Rip-off

My girlfriend (whom I live with) has recently started a new job and hence joined Discovery medical scheme starting on 1 March 2018. We are both currently members at Virgin Active and she was looking forward to joining the Vitality program as well as receiving the “discounted” monthly gym fees. We went to Virgin Active Bedfordview (where we are currently members) and discussed the procedure for activating her vitality discount where we were told that she has to pay an activation fee of R1990 and R125 for a new card despite already being an active member.

Now I can understand new members having to pay a signup fee as this is standard procedure at most gyms, including Virgin Active. There is administration involved and they don’t want members signing up for short periods of time and cancelling contracts say during the winter months when they are less inclined to go. I can even understand this fee be slightly higher than the standard signup fee as there is (very) slightly more administration involved. But I cannot understand why an existing member should fork out another R1990 on top of their original signup fee to join a club which they are already a member at.

Could Discovery or Virgin Active kindly provide some information as to what exactly this “activation fee” covers? R2115 is not exactly a small amount of money. As far as I can see, the only administration involved in this case is entering a vitality (and possibly a medical aid) number into the system. Does this cost R2115? Are you saying that your administration staff are taking some 15 to 20 hours of administration to enter this number or are you paying anaesthetists to enter this number? Or are you using the signup fees to subsidise other members “discounts”?

Why do you need to charge a R2115 activation fee for Virgin Active and not for Park Run? Is there no administration involved in linking the vitality number with a Park Run barcode? Is there no administration involved in linking a fitness device to Vitality?

Let’s explore this a bit further. Her current gym membership is R500 a month. Let’s assume that her fees drop to R185 a month (this was the verbally mentioned monthly fee) once she pays this activation fee. Now add on the monthly Vitality membership of R239 required to get the discount and her net savings are R76 a month. Divide that into the “activation fees” and we are looking at 28 months before a single cent is saved. Does this seem reasonable or is there something we are missing? Even without the Vitality membership that is 7 months’ worth of savings to cover the activation fee.

I thought the idea behind Vitality was to promote wellness and a healthy lifestyle, is charging members R2115 to sign up an incentive to be healthy? Something seems wrong here…