The AI email agent for gyms and fitness studios

The front-desk inbox problem

Every gym owner knows the rhythm of the info@ inbox. January brings a wall of "how much is membership?" and "do you do a trial?". Exam season and summer bring freeze requests. All year round there is a steady drip of "what time is spin on Thursday?", "is there parking?", "can I bring a guest?", and the occasional carefully worded cancellation email. None of these questions is hard. All of them take someone off the floor, or off a sales conversation, to answer.

The economics are awkward too. Front-desk cover is one of the biggest controllable costs in a gym, and email is the task that quietly eats it. Meanwhile the prospect who emailed three gyms about a trial at 9pm joins whichever one answers first, and the member whose freeze request sat unanswered for four days is now a member drafting a cancellation instead. Fast, accurate email is not admin; it is retention and sales.

An AI email agent fits this problem unusually well, because almost every question a gym gets asked has an answer that already exists in writing: your price list, your timetable, your terms and conditions. InReply turns those documents into instant, accurate replies, and routes everything else to your team.

What members and prospects actually ask

• Membership questions. Prices, contract lengths, joining fees, off-peak options, student and corporate rates, what is included.
• Class schedules. What runs when, how to book, waitlists, whether classes are included in membership, beginner-friendliness.
• Freezes. Whether memberships can be paused, for how long, what it costs, how to request one.
• Cancellation policy questions. Notice periods, how to give notice, what happens to direct debits and remaining sessions.
• Trial and tour requests. "Can I try before I join?" and "can I come and have a look round?", the highest value emails in the inbox.
• Practical questions. Opening hours, parking, showers and lockers, age limits, personal training, guest passes.

Notice what these have in common: the answers are policy, not judgement. You have already decided your freeze rules and your timetable. The work left is retrieving the right answer and typing it politely, dozens of times a week, which is exactly the work worth automating.

Answered from your own policies, not a chatbot script

InReply connects to your existing Gmail or Outlook inbox via secure OAuth. There is no new email client, no extension and no new address; enquiries keep landing where they always have, and replies go out from the address members already know.

You then build the knowledge base: your membership options and prices, your class timetable, your freeze and cancellation terms, your opening hours, your trial offer, your FAQ. That knowledge base is the only source InReply is allowed to answer from. When someone asks whether they can freeze for two months, the reply quotes your freeze policy, in your tone, because it literally cannot answer from anywhere else.

And when a question is not covered, InReply does not improvise. The email is left for a human and surfaced on the actions list. A gym's policies are commitments; a made-up answer about contract terms creates exactly the front-desk dispute you were trying to avoid. Escalating honestly is a feature, not a limitation.

Playbooks let you shape behaviour per scenario: a friendly, sales-forward tone for trial enquiries, a clear and neutral tone for policy questions, and hard routing rules for anything you want a person to own. If you have compared this category before, this is the difference between an email agent and an autoresponder; the email answering service guide covers the distinction in detail.

Trials and tours: turning enquiries into visits

To be precise about what happens with bookings: InReply does not integrate with class booking systems, gym management software or calendars. What it automates is the email conversation, which is where most trial enquiries stall. A prospect asks about a trial at 9pm; InReply replies within minutes with your trial offer, what to bring, and the times tours run, taken from your knowledge base, and asks which time suits. When the prospect picks one, the confirmation is flagged for your team on the actions list, and a person confirms it and records it in your own system.

The prospect gets an instant, specific, human-sounding answer while their motivation is still high. Your team gets a warm, scheduled visit instead of a cold enquiry from four days ago.

Ghost Mode or Autopilot: your call, per scenario

Every plan includes Ghost Mode: each reply InReply writes is saved as a draft in your Gmail or Outlook, and nothing sends until someone approves it. New gyms typically run a week or two in Ghost Mode, reviewing drafts on real emails and tightening the knowledge base where answers come out wrong or thin.

Autopilot sends automatically and is controlled per playbook. The common pattern: put timetable, opening hours, pricing and trial-offer questions on Autopilot first, because the answers are factual and the cost of a rare imperfect reply is low. Keep freezes in Ghost Mode until you trust the drafts. Keep cancellations and complaints wherever you are comfortable, including fully human. There is no pressure to automate everything; the point is choosing deliberately.

Keep cancellations human

Cancellation emails deserve their own section, because they are where gym owners rightly hesitate. A cancellation is rarely just a cancellation; it is often a savable member, and the save depends on a human reading the situation. InReply is built to respect that. A playbook can route every cancellation email straight to your team, untouched, flagged on the actions list with urgent marking so it never sits unseen. Or it can answer only the mechanical part (your notice period and process) while a person handles the relationship. Team members have their own logins with per-inbox access, so the right person at the right site sees it.

The same routing applies to complaints, medical issues, refund requests and anything else where empathy beats speed. The actions list exists precisely so that automating the routine 80 percent makes the sensitive 20 percent more visible, not less.

Pricing for gyms and studios

A single-site studio typically starts on Starter (£39/month, 500 credits, one inbox). Growth (£79/month, 2,000 credits, three inboxes) suits a busier gym or a two-site operation; Scale (£149/month, 5,000 credits, five inboxes) covers small chains, and Business is custom for 10,000+ credits with unlimited inboxes. Pricing is a flat monthly workspace price rather than per seat, so the whole front-desk team can use it at no extra cost. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial and no credit card; the full breakdown is public.

InReply also serves other enquiry-heavy businesses, including property agents and vacation rental hosts.

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