Lagree Fit 415 — Local services in San Francisco

tldr: great facility/equipment, a couple really excellent instructors (Cat, Staci), low availability for booking classes

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed taking classes at Lagree Fit 415!

Facility: The studio is nice, spacious and clean. The equipment/machines are well kept and recently updated.

Instructors: Some instructors are really excellent. Staci C and Cat Y are definitely my favorites. They both do a great job of coming up with new and challenging classes every time that integrate a variety of moves. They also walk around to provide targeted form corrections throughout class, which is really helpful. Other instructors I’ve had are all nice, but may be a bit more standard in terms of the routines and cueing, and usually don’t provide detailed corrections.

Booking Availability: It can be really challenging to find booking availability for classes, especially with instructors that I prefer during non-weekday/9-5. Most of the time I have to either book classes a month in advance or try to get on the waitlist the day before. I don’t know that there’s really a solution to this given high demand and limited space, so I don’t blame the studio, but it is hard to be able to use all of my monthly membership quota of classes given the situation. Maybe publishing a schedule of when the booking window will open for new class days/times and increasing the waitlist size would be helpful to at least make the experience smoother?

Workout Quality: I feel that my core strength has definitely improved. I walk out of class feeling like I’ve spent time well worth it to work on strengthening my body.

Would definitely recommend as a solid place to take...

I liked the classes here but ultimately I felt like I was not getting good value out of my membership.

The issue is this: They used to have a promo where if you gave them a 5 star review on Yelp and/or Google, you would get a class for $5. This means that many of their 5 star reviews were effectively paid for. I have no doubt that they would have gotten some 5 star reviews if they had let it happen organically, but just not quite so many.

As a result, there is an inflated demand for their classes, so they can charge extremely high prices and still always be full. Too often, I was not able to book a class when I was available because everything was booked days in advance. It just made the membership not worth it and trying to book a class was unnecessarily difficult. I'd rather have a gym pass where I can just show up.

EDIT AFTER BUSINESS'S RESPONSE:

Yes, I am aware that the promotion no longer exists, which is why I wrote "they USED TO have a promo". It lasted a long time though; I think after the 5$ class they went to a 10$ class. This allowed them to build a strong customer base which they still have, and all those fake 5 star reviews are still up bringing in new clients, so it's very disingenuous of this business to say that they are committed to ensuring that all of their reviews are genuine and organic. Evidently they are not. If they had really had a change of heart since running that promo, they would get Google to take down the reviews that they paid for.

Anyway, this isn't my battle, but as I said, the result was that as a customer I didn't get to fully enjoy the membership I was paying for, so I stopped going....

All in all, this is a nice place to get a workout, especially if you want to focus on core and lower body.

The teachers are mostly good, with the exception of Charlotte who is unskilled and presumptuous.

Making and changing reservations is a bit annoying because the website is password-free with many unnecessary steps to log in. The choice is between a burdensome process and downloading the app, and I am never a fan of being forced to download another app.

Customer service is a mixed bag. On the one hand, most teachers are friendly and I like the vibe better than that of larger gyms. On the other hand, management is not receptive to any feedback that is less than stellar.

Added:

Another issue with the reservation system is that it doesn't always work when you try to cancel. Sometimes changing browsers can do the trick, but today I clicked cancel 5 minutes before the late-cancel cut off, happy that I had canceled just in time. Unfortunately ten minutes later I realized the cancellation still was processing, at which point it was too late if I wanted to avoid being charged a fee.

On that, another reviewer pointed out that their late cancel/no show fees are illegal as businesses can't charge more for a no-show than the original price of the service. In the case of class passes at least, this is correct, since you are already paying the full price of the service by losing a class credit. In my experience, if you file a chargeback and explain this to the credit card company, Lagree...