Encouraging data from first week of reopened clubs in France
Hoofddorp, 8 June 2020 – Basic-Fit N.V. (Basic-Fit), Europe’s largest and fastest growing fitness chain, updates the market on the latest developments regarding the lifting of COVID-19 related government measures.

As of today, 520 out of Basic-Fit’s total network of 828 clubs have reopened. Last week, the Belgian government announced that we could reopen all our clubs on 8 June, the same day that we could also start to reopen our first clubs in Spain. The clubs in Luxembourg and most of the clubs in France were already reopened on 29 May and 2 June respectively. In the Netherlands the preliminary reopening date is 1 July, whilst the discussions with the government for an earlier opening date continue. An updated overview of the reopening dates is provided in the table below.
In France, we reopened 316 clubs last week. Our clubs reopened in full compliance with the government requirements to make sure our employees can work, and our members can exercise in a safe and comfortable way. With an online reservation system, we are able to manage the flow of people to our clubs and the number of people in our clubs at any given time. Through signage and clear communications members can safely move around in the clubs whilst keeping the required distance between each other. We increased the already high standard cleaning protocols and have ample availability of cleaning stations in the club so people can clean their equipment before and after their workout. In addition, we have optimized the ventilation in the clubs to make sure that there is no recirculation of air and the inflow of fresh air is well above the expected recommended levels. We do appreciate, however, that not everyone might be fully comfortable to come back to their club immediately. We therefore offered members the option to freeze their memberships for two more weeks. Less than 3% of the members opted for this. At the same time, more than 750,000 workout slots have already been used or booked through the Basic-Fit GymTime reservations app in France alone.

The number of memberships in the French clubs increased slightly last week due to the large number of joiners, which more than compensated for the number of cancellations. These first data points are encouraging and confirm the positive trends that peers have seen and reported on in countries where clubs reopened already in the past months.

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