Three changes cover most of it, and the first one is a check rather than a change. Open Settings › Messaging and look at the class reminder: on an account opened today email is already ticked, on an older one it may be off entirely, and gyms lose a month either way by assuming. Check that auto check-in is off, which is how it ships, so you can see who actually came. Set a cancellation cutoff long enough that a freed spot can be refilled. That is ten minutes of setup. Everything after that is schedule work, and no software does the schedule work for you.
Four reasons people book and don't come
Sort your absences before you fix them. Each cause has a different answer, and only three of the four are settings.
- They forgot. Booked on Sunday for a Thursday class. A reminder fixes this one, and nothing else.
- Cancelling felt pointless. Nothing came back to them, nobody was waiting for the spot, so they said nothing. A cutoff that returns the credit plus a working waitlist fixes this.
- They booked three slots to keep options open. Booking costs nothing, so hedging costs nothing. A shorter booking window fixes this.
- The hour is wrong, or the coach changed. Nothing in any software fixes this.
Most owners jump straight to reminders and stop there. Reminders only recover the first bucket.
Measure it first, or you are guessing
A booking is an intention. A check-in is attendance. They are two separate records, and one setting merges them: Settings › Classes › Check-in › Auto check-in on booking. It ships off, so check it before anything else. Switched on, every booking counts as a presence, your no-show rate is permanently zero, and every attendance figure you look at is fiction. Turn it off and check people in at the door, from the reception screen or the kiosk.
Then switch on No-show policy in Settings › Classes › Booking & cancellation, and leave the fee at 0. At 0 it flags and charges nothing: overnight, every past booking with no check-in flips to no-show. Two weeks later you have real numbers instead of an impression.
Count per time slot, never gym-wide. A gym sitting at 12% overall is usually most classes at 5% and one 6am class at 35%. No screen does that split for you: Reports gives one attendance total and a trend line for the whole gym, never a breakdown by class. The raw material is there, though. Members › Export › Attendance (CSV) writes one line per booking that was not cancelled, with the date, the member, the class and the status, no-shows included. That is a pivot table in a spreadsheet rather than an evening with a notebook. Take that export and not the Attendance button on Reports, which names the class by its internal id. Day to day, the Members page has an alert that lists everyone booked but not checked in today. A working rule: under 10% on a slot, ignore it, that is life. Over 25% on one slot, the slot is the problem, not your members.
The reminder is free, and it is off until you switch it on
MoveMembers sends a class reminder to everyone booked for the day, automatically, on every plan including Free. On an account opened today, email and LINE are already ticked, so email sends from your first booking onward and LINE starts the day you connect your LINE Official Account. An account opened before this default may have every channel off, and those two are the only channels this reminder uses: WhatsApp and SMS never carry it. Either way the answer is in the same place: Settings › Messaging › Built-in messages, entry Class Reminder. Look before you promise your members a reminder, and look again before you assume none is going out. There is one send, at the hour you choose, on the day of the class or a set number of days before it. You cannot ask for a reminder two hours before a 19:00 class, and someone who books after that hour for a class the same evening gets no reminder at all.
Two things to know before you lean on it, both about how messaging actually works:
- There are no push notifications. The member app is an installable web app, not an App Store download. A reminder is an email or a LINE message, not a badge on a home screen. If your members live on LINE, connect LINE and use that channel: that is the normal case for a gym in Thailand, where an emailed reminder is a reminder nobody reads.
- Only LINE and email are two-way. WhatsApp and SMS go out and nothing comes back. WhatsApp because Meta only allows replies inside a 24 hour window and we would rather not pretend otherwise, SMS because it sends through your own Twilio account with no inbox on our side. Both sit on the Max plan. If someone answers "can't make it" on WhatsApp, you never see it. That reply has to arrive by LINE, by email, or as a cancellation in their member space.
A reminder does not create motivation. What it does is turn "I forgot" into "I cancelled", several hours earlier. That is the entire point, because an early cancellation is a seat you can sell twice.
What a waitlist really does
It does not reduce no-shows. It recycles the seat. Worth being blunt about, because a waitlist gets sold as a no-show cure and it is not one.
With Automatic waitlist on, a member who hits a full class joins a queue. When someone cancels, the first in line is booked automatically and gets a "you're in" message. Nobody at the desk touches anything.
A no-show and a cancellation cost you the same seat. The only difference is how many hours of notice you get, and that is the one thing your settings control.
The catch is timing, and it is real. Promotion happens the second the spot frees, with no window to accept and no way to skip someone. A cancellation at 19:50 for a 20:00 class moves in a member who will not read the message in time, so you have swapped one empty spot for another. A waitlist only pays off when cancellations land hours ahead, which is exactly what the cutoff controls. Both settings sit together on the scheduling and booking side of the software.
Set the cutoff to the time you need to refill
The cancellation cutoff is how many hours before a class a member can still cancel without penalty. The default is 2 hours. Choose it by asking how long you need to fill a spot from the waitlist, not by how strict you feel today.
| Cutoff | What it buys you | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Anytime | Members always tell you | You learn about the empty spot at 19:58, when nobody can take it |
| 2 hours | Enough for a regular who checks their phone | Too short for evening classes, the waitlist rarely moves in time |
| 4 to 6 hours | Evening cancellations land in the afternoon, the waitlist actually works | Two or three complaints in the first week |
| 24 hours | Clean planning for the coach | Backfires. Once the penalty is the same either way, members stop cancelling and simply don't turn up |
Then write your rule in plain words in Cancellation policy shown to members. Two sentences. It appears in the member's confirmation sheet, directly above the Cancel button, next to the cutoff the software enforces. Nobody can claim they didn't know, because they read it at the moment they cancel. On a pass or a class pack, cancelling in time returns the credit to their balance on its own.
Charging for it, and when not to
Set a no-show fee above 0 and the nightly sweep adds that amount as an overdue balance on the member's account. Be clear on what that is: a debt you now have to collect at the counter, not a silent card charge. A no-show fee is never charged to a card. The only automatic charges in MoveMembers are the monthly instalments a member chose when buying a product from their member space, and those run through your own Stripe account, with no commission for us.
In a small gym, do this instead, in order.
- Flag only for one month, fee at 0.
- Look at who has three or more flags. In most gyms that is two to five people out of a hundred.
- Message those people once, by name, with no template. "Saw you booked Tuesday and Thursday and missed both, everything alright?" That conversation outperforms a 100 baht fee, because the honest answer is usually an injury, a new work shift, or a class they have quietly outgrown.
- Only if one slot is still above 25% after that, put a fee on it. A gym-wide fee to correct five people costs you goodwill with the other ninety-five.
What no software fixes
- A class nobody wants. If the 6am averages 5 booked out of 16 and 3 on the mat, the hour is wrong or the format is. Move it, merge it, or cut it. Reminders on a class people regret booking just move the cancellation earlier. That is progress, not a full room.
- A booking window that invites hedging. The default is 30 days. Someone booking a Thursday class three weeks out has a good intention, not a plan. Drop the window to 7 days and you lose almost nothing genuine.
- Teaching to two people. Decide your own floor, say four booked two hours before, and cancel the session yourself from the schedule. Everyone booked is told for you, by email and on LINE, because Cancellation notification in Settings › Classes › Reminders & notifications ships switched on. Reopen the session later and they are told again, which matters more than it sounds: reopening restores nothing, their booking was never removed, so without that second message they stay away from a class they are still in. Closing a whole day is a different tool, the Holidays button on the schedule, and that one writes to every active member rather than to the people booked. An honest cancellation beats a coach and two members.
- Coaches. Attendance follows people. When a coach leaves, the no-show rate in their slot moves before anyone cancels a membership. Watch that number for a month after any change on the mat.
Ten minutes now, twenty minutes in two weeks
- Settings › Classes › Check-in: turn Auto check-in on booking off.
- Settings › Classes › Booking & cancellation: No-show policy on, fee 0, cutoff at 4 hours, Automatic waitlist on. Write two sentences in the policy box.
- Settings › Messaging › Built-in messages: tick email on Class Reminder, and LINE too if your LINE channel is connected.
- Two weeks later, take the Members attendance export and spend fifteen minutes in a spreadsheet: booked against checked in, slot by slot, worst first. The software will not build that table for you.
- Act on the worst slot only. Move it, change the coach, or cut its capacity down to the number that actually shows up.
That last one is the move nobody makes. A 20 cap class with 9 people reads as a failure. The same 9 in a 12 cap class reads as full, fills a waitlist, and that waitlist is what finally makes cancellations worth something to you.