A fitness class booking app is a consumer app through which people find and book classes across many fitness and wellness studios, such as yoga, spin, pilates and boxing studios. The app owns no studios itself. It sells spare places in other studios' classes. The best-known apps of this kind are used mainly in the United States and Europe.
Most of these apps use credits rather than a fixed number of visits. The member pays a monthly fee and receives a number of credits. Each class costs some credits. A popular class at a busy time costs more credits than the same class early in the morning. Changing the price with demand in this way is called dynamic pricing.
Consider a member in Chicago, in the United States, who pays $59 a month for 45 credits. On Monday, she searches for a spin class near her office after work. The app shows a 6 pm class with four places left, for 9 credits. A 7 am class at the same studio costs only 5 credits, because fewer people want it. She books the 6 pm class, and the app deducts 9 credits. The app sends the booking to the studio's own studio booking software, which marks one more place as taken. After the class, the app pays the studio an agreed amount for her visit.
Why do studios accept this? Take a spin class with 20 places that usually has 14 riders. Six places stay empty, and the studio earns nothing from them. Through the app, the studio earns something from those places. But the studio decides how many places to give the app, so that its own full-price members still find space.
The app and the studio software are often made by the same company. Then a studio that uses that company's booking software can list its classes in the app with no extra work. The app also gives the studio new customers, some of whom later buy the studio's own membership.
In India, the closest equivalent is a fitness membership app, which usually runs many of its own centres as well as partner gyms. A similar consumer app exists for booking badminton courts and football turfs: the sports venue booking app.