Ever since 2002, Edinburgh Leisure has had good results with a wide range of Gladstone products, from the company’s signature Plus2 membership management software to the Connect and Join@Home modules for online booking and joining. So when Gladstone announced they were launching a new smart phone app called MobilePro, we knew right away that we wanted to be early adopters.

Our customers have been asking us for while now if they can access our website and book fitness classes on their smart phones, and we knew that if we wanted to stay competitive, it was vital for us to offer this kind of flexibility.

In January and February, we soft-launched MobilePro in 15 out of our 30 sites, and started to actively promote it on 3 March via our website and Facebook page. The results have been incredible. During the soft-launch period we had 1,000 downloads, but just 16 days after the official launch those numbers had already topped 3,500.

So far, 75 per cent of downloads have been for booking classes – on 3 March alone, 486 bookings were made using MobilePro – and our pool timetables module is also popular. Customer feedback has been terrific. They love being able to book and cancel classes on the go, even when sites are closed, and they like how easy it is to access information on how many spaces are left in a class or where they are on a waiting list.

As well as having a real impact on customer satisfaction, the app is great for sending push messages to inform people of maintenance/downtime issues on site or time-limited promotions. This is in addition to dedicated News and Offers tiles on the home screen, which can be updated as necessary. Adding or amending content using the MobilePro Web Cockpit is very straightforward, and navigating the system has been made even easier since the launch thanks to the developers taking on board some of our feedback.

When it comes to making the most of the app, the real-time reporting feature is extremely useful. Not only does it give us an instant overview of the number of downloads in any given period, but it also breaks this down by venue, as well as showing us which modules are most popular. Having this data will be invaluable moving forward, as it will help us decide which modules we definitely want to keep and which ones we need to either change or promote more.

Overall, we are delighted with the results we’ve seen from MobilePro so far. Looking ahead, we’d like to incorporate bookings for activities outside the gym or fitness studio – such as golf, tennis, badminton and squash – into the app. As soon as this functionality becomes available in the next couple of months, we plan to roll it out to some of our other sites.

Stuart Fairbairn, ICT manager, Edinburgh Leisure