The Marketplace Trap: When Your Gym Software Shows Members Your Competitors

Picture this. You own a Pilates studio. You've spent years building a roster of regulars who love your instructors, your space, and the community you've created. One of them pulls out her phone to book her Thursday reformer class — and the app she's booking through opens to a screen of other Pilates studios near her. One is two dollars cheaper. One has a brand-new facility across town. One is running an intro offer.

You didn't put those studios in front of her. Your software did.

This is the quiet cost of the marketplace model, and most gym owners never think about it until a loyal member mentions she "found a place closer to work." Let's talk about what's actually happening, who it serves, and why it's especially dangerous for the kind of studio people choose on purpose.

What a "Marketplace" Booking App Actually Is

The biggest name here is Mindbody. Beyond the software it sells to studios, Mindbody runs a consumer app and website — a marketplace where everyday users "search for, book, and pay" for fitness and wellness classes, billed as "the largest selection of fitness classes and studios near you." In 2021, Mindbody acquired ClassPass in an all-stock deal backed by a $500 million investment, and folded it into "Mindbody Marketplace" — doubling down on the consumer-discovery side of the business.

To be fair, Mindbody pitches this as a benefit. The marketplace, they tell owners, is a discovery engine: millions of active users browsing for classes, and tens of thousands making a first purchase at a new business every month. If you're a brand-new studio with no following, getting listed where people are already shopping has obvious appeal.

The problem is that a discovery engine doesn't only point outward. It points your own members at everyone else, too.

The Double Edge

Here's the part the sales deck skips. A marketplace is, by design, a comparison surface. Its entire job is to show a user every option in their area and make switching frictionless — same login, same saved card, one tap to book somewhere new.

That cuts both ways:

• For the platform, more browsing and more bookings across more studios is the whole point. Every reservation, no matter whose studio it's at, runs through their rails.
• For you, the same screen that might surface a new lead is guaranteed to surface your competitors to the members you already worked hard to win.

So you end up paying — in subscription fees and, on the marketplace side, in commissions — for a tool that treats your loyal client and a curious first-timer exactly the same: as a shopper to be matched with the nearest available class. The net winner of frictionless switching isn't the incumbent studio. It's the platform that earns on every switch.

Why This Hurts Destination Studios the Most

Not every business is equally exposed. A big-box gym competing mostly on price and location might genuinely benefit from marketplace traffic. But most of the studios reading this aren't big-box gyms.

If you run a Pilates studio, a martial arts academy, a boutique strength gym, or a yoga studio, your members didn't choose you because you were the closest dot on a map. They chose you for a specific instructor, a teaching style, a progression system, a community. That specificity is your moat.

A marketplace erodes that moat by reframing you as one interchangeable tile in a grid. When your member books inside an app that lists eight other "Pilates near me" results sorted by price and distance, you've been quietly demoted from "my studio" to "an option." You're now competing on the marketplace's terms — convenience and price — instead of the terms you actually win on.

The members most likely to wander are rarely your best ones, either. Deal-driven, low-commitment browsers are exactly who a comparison marketplace is built for. Your most loyal members may never click. But you don't need many to drift before the math turns against you — in an industry where member acquisition keeps getting more expensive, a leaky back door is far costlier than a slow front door.

Who the Marketplace Is Really For

Strip away the marketing and the model is straightforward. A consumer marketplace serves two parties extremely well:

1. The platform, which monetizes discovery, booking, and switching across its entire network.
2. The shopper, who gets a friction-free way to try the cheapest or closest class this week.

The studio owner is a distant third — a supplier of inventory whose own clients are part of the browsable catalog. None of that makes Mindbody a bad company or its marketplace a scam. It's a perfectly rational business. It's just not your business, and its incentives and yours are not the same.

What to Look for Instead

The fix isn't to hide from the internet. It's to own your booking channel instead of renting space in someone else's mall.

When you're evaluating gym software, ask a simple question: when my member opens this to book, what do they see? You want the answer to be your studio, and only your studio — your brand, your classes, your schedule. Not a directory.

That's the approach we took with GymPoint. There's no consumer marketplace and no competitor list, because we don't run one. Your members book through your own branded member portal — your link, your name, accessible from any phone's browser — alongside a fast front-desk check-in kiosk. The booking experience points one direction: at you. Discovery of new clients happens through your website, your funnel, and your lead pipeline, where you control the message and keep the relationship — rather than through a shared app that's showing your regulars the studio down the street.

It's a deliberate philosophy: your software should be your storefront, not a mall directory that lists every neighbor beside you.

The Bottom Line

A marketplace booking app is a fair trade for a business with no audience and nothing to lose. For a destination studio with a loyal base, it's the opposite — you're paying to put your hardest-won members one tap away from everyone you compete with.

Before you renew, open your booking app the way a member would and look at what's on the screen. If you see your competitors, ask yourself who that's really for.

If you'd rather your software sold your studio instead of its marketplace, book a demo and we'll show you what owning your booking channel looks like.