27 May Centaman guide to re-opening your leisure facility
Restrictions to control COVID-19 are beginning to ease across Australia and New Zealand and many leisure centres, aquatic facilities and gyms are either operating or preparing to throw open their doors.
This guide provides an overview of the key steps that Centaman users will want to take, including considering the right time to resume membership payments and courses and how to manage contact tracing and capacity limits. All of these can be managed easily with a little help from Centaman and some recently released tools from Jonas Leisure.
Resuming memberships
You may have permitted members to suspend their membership payments in the lead-up to the recent COVID-19 closure. Now that the virus is being brought under control, you may want to consider whether or not you wish to unsuspend their memberships.
Some facilities are leaving memberships suspended for the time being and charging members at a discounted casual rate for each visit until things get back to normal and full service can resume.
However, when the time comes for you to unsuspend memberships, Centaman users can utilise the ‘Remove Time Stop’ feature to make the process easy. This may be done as part of a policy decision to unsuspend members on a specific date, or simply by unsuspending their passes when they tag in at your reception desk for the first time following your re-opening.
If you want to unsuspend a large group of memberships at once, it’s a good idea to refresh your Centaman test environment and unsuspend in bulk there first, just to make sure things are running as intended. Keep in mind you will need to notify customers that their accounts (and any membership payments) will resume.
It’s also important to check in with your payment solutions provider EziDebit to make sure your organisational account is unsuspended, and payments have resumed.
Resuming courses
Just like for memberships, you will need to consider how you will configure and run classes to meet COVID-19 requirements. You may need to consider any class size limits, as well as the number of people who will be returning immediately.
In many cases it will be simplest to re-create your classes in Centaman, setting new class size limits and start and end dates, before and re-enrolling participants.
Use online member services to take the pressure off
The first few weeks of re-opening will be a busy time as members return to your facility.
It’s a good idea to encourage members to make use of Centaman ePass to update their name, contact details and other account information from the comfort of home. This also allows them to buy and renew memberships, further removing stress for your team.
Staff can also manually update member details as required – perhaps as part of the re-opening process for each member when they visit your leisure or fitness centre.
For new members, Centaman makes it easy to create members’ accounts and sign them up at your centre. Once set up, members can use Centaman ePass to update their personal details and billing details without creating unnecessary queues at your front desk.
Contact tracing and managing check ins
Contact tracing is now required in Australia and New Zealand so you will need to collect details of every member or casual class attendee who visits your facility. This can be done in a number of ways – whether it’s via a pen and paper system or the use of a digital solution that streamlines the check in and check out process.
The free Visitance app released by Jonas Leisure earlier this month makes it simple for leisure centres, aquatic facilities and gyms to gather necessary information from visitors by using a QR code placed at their front entrance or reception desk a facility.
Members and other visitors can easily scan the QR code using the camera app on their phones to load a branded web page where they can enter details including their name, phone number and email address before going inside. This information is then securely held, allowing managers to quickly contact people if a case of COVID-19 is discovered among facility users.
The site can also be set up to interface with a screen at the entrance of a facility to show a real-time count of how many people are currently inside – making it easy to ensure occupancy limits are not exceeded.
Timeslot booking to manage capacity
Governments in Australian states and New Zealand have put in place capacity limits for health and fitness centres to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading and to make contact tracing easier if anybody does happen to catch the virus. These vary by country and state, so it’s important to know the rules in your area.
Jonas Leisure has released a new solution called Group Move which makes it simple to set up bookable time slots with pre-set capacity limits for group fitness classes and spaces within your facility, such as swimming pools and gyms. Members and casual visitors can then use Group Move to book the activity and time slot of their choosing.
If a particular time slot reaches your nominated capacity limit, it will be blocked out to prevent additional bookings. Staff at your front desk can also use Group Move to manually book people in as they arrive, for any walk-up members or visitors. Group Move will help you maintain your capacity limits and stay compliant.
Communicate any changes
With so many rule variations from country to country and between states, don’t assume your members will know that you’re ready to re-open.
Get in touch with them via email or SMS to give them a full update on your re-opening plan. Make sure to include any relevant dates, changes to hours, updated group fitness timetables, information about contact tracing and capacity requirements and any COVID health and safety procedures in your centre.
Also consider outlining the process for how they can resume their memberships, passes or enrolments to your centre and answer any commonly asked questions you may expect.
Need more support?
Contact our support team to learn more about how to re-open your facility with Centaman. We’re here to help.