Study: Most negative gym reviews focus on how clubs are run

A study of 5,497 one- and two-star Google reviews from 256 high-review-count gyms and fitness clubs found that reviewers most often complained about operations, not equipment, across eight U.S. metros. The findings suggest gym owners should pay close attention to cancellation, billing and staff issues that may be driving customer dissatisfaction.

Why it matters: - The study points to operational problems, not just facility issues, as the main source of low-rated gym reviews. - That matters for gym owners because complaints about cancellation, billing and staff behavior can signal avoidable friction that may affect retention and reputation. - The research is based on Google reviews from eight U.S. metro areas, giving it a broad look at how customers describe negative experiences.

What happened: - Sales Roadmap published a study of 5,497 written one- and two-star Google reviews from 256 high-review-count gyms and fitness clubs. - Kamyar Shah, a fractional COO and founder of World Consulting Group, conducted the study. - The gyms and fitness clubs were in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Denver, Tampa and Kansas City. - The reviews came from the lowest-rated written Google reviews, with at least five words, retrieved from up to 60 reviews per business. - Review dates in the corpus ranged from 2010-01-25 to 2026-09-30.

The details: - A model classified the main reason in 5,491 of the 5,497 reviews, and 80.1% of those were mainly about how the gym is run. - The model classified equipment and the facility itself as the main reason in 19.0% of the labelled reviews. - Another 0.9% of the labelled reviews were unclear. - Staff conduct was the most common theme overall, appearing in 43.5% of the reviews. - Cancellation process appeared in 29.3% of the reviews. - Billing described by reviewers as unauthorized appeared in 28.0% of the reviews. - Sales and contract terms appeared in 24.2% of the reviews. - The “Other” label accounted for 17.2% of the reviews, and the study did not characterize those contents. - Core-service issues, covering equipment and cleanliness, appeared in 30.0% of the reviews. - Facility cleanliness was assigned to 20.2% of the reviews. - Equipment condition was assigned to 19.2% of the reviews. - One reviewer wrote, “I've been trying to cancel my membership for 3 months.” - Another reviewer wrote that “they failed to tell me when I joined that they would be moving their location”. - The sampled 282 gyms and fitness clubs held 136,703 lifetime Google reviews. - Of those lifetime reviews, 11,587, or 8.5%, were one- or two-star reviews. - Five-star reviews made up 84.2% of the lifetime total. - Of the 282 sampled businesses, 256 had at least one review in the corpus. - The study says the figures describe the sampled written one- and two-star reviews, not member or customer shares. - Reviews were retrieved through the DataForSEO business data API. - In each metro, up to 200 listings were screened. - After filters including a cap of two locations per brand, the 40 businesses with the most Google reviews were sampled. - Thirty-eight businesses were excluded after their names were reviewed, including climbing gyms, children's programs and institutional facilities. - Claude Haiku 4.5 classified the main reason, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 classified 200 of the same reviews. - On the binary question of how the business is run versus every other main reason, the two models agreed 94.5% of the time, with a Cohen's kappa of 0.841. - No sample was checked against human coding. - The study did not check any charge, contract or cancellation, and it makes no finding about whether any charge was authorized. - The full study is available at the full study.

Between the lines: - The findings suggest that negative gym reviews often track service friction and back-office policy issues more than equipment quality. - Because the study relies on model classification, the results show how reviews were labeled, not verified facts about each complaint. - Shah said gym owners can use the reviews as prompts to compare against their own records. - Shah also said reviewers describe cancellation steps, charges they object to and information they say was not disclosed at joining.

What's next: - Gym operators can use the study as a checklist for likely pain points, especially cancellation rules, billing practices and staff training. - The research may encourage more operators to audit review trends against internal records and customer service processes. - Shah said the study counts what reviewers wrote and how a model labeled it, and does not judge whether any gym or reviewer was right.