1.87 million sports cards in Poland. A gym still cannot tell who actually pays the club
On 20 August 2026 Benefit Systems reported 1,876,300 active sports cards in Poland and 360,800 of its own B2C memberships. An independent club reads from that the gate, the per-visit fee, and a studio that fills at 6 p.m. in September while the morning class stays empty.
20 August 2026 Bankier.pl, citing PAP Biznes, reported Benefit Systems’ half-year results. Poland had 1,876,300 active sports cards, 11 per cent more than a year earlier. The group’s own B2C memberships stood at 360,800, up 27 per cent. At the end of June it ran 296 fitness clubs in the country.
An independent gym reads from those figures who is standing at the gate in the evening: a member who paid the club, or a cardholder for whom the club will receive a fee for a registered visit. Gym software will not change MultiSport’s share of the market. It can show how much of today’s occupancy stays in the club’s till.
What Benefit Systems reported on 20 August
Net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent in the second quarter of 2026 was PLN 222.2 million. The PAP Biznes consensus had assumed PLN 200 million. Quarterly revenue: PLN 1,459.7 million against an expected PLN 1,434.5 million. EBITDA was PLN 459.1 million, EBIT PLN 265.7 million.
At the end of June the group’s sports-card user base had grown to just under 2.7 million. Benefit Systems managed 595 clubs used by 783,900 membership holders. The Poland segment — cards, club chains including Zdrofit, and the Multi.Life and MyBenefit programmes — posted PLN 838 million of revenue in the second quarter, 18 per cent more than a year earlier. Operating profit: PLN 216 million, up 13 per cent.
In the same report the company estimates the long-term potential of the sports-card market in Poland at 2.5–2.8 million cards. Abroad, excluding Turkey, 1.7–2.0 million. The arguments it gives are commercial, not legal: low unemployment, a strong labour market, and a greater willingness to buy sports products among people who are only just starting jobs. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the company writes, awareness of health and immunity has risen, and with it the popularity of cards.
21 August 2026 the same agency covered a call with management board member Marcin Fojudzki. The company is sticking to a target of about 130,000 new cards in Poland in 2026. It plans to open more than 20 clubs in the country. Fojudzki said consolidation on the Polish market was “rather coming to an end than in full bloom”. If an independent club was waiting to be bought by the chain, that remark points elsewhere: it stays next to Zdrofit, not in its portfolio.
In the presentation for July and August 2026, card ARPU in Poland rose 4 per cent year on year, gross profit 2 per cent. The number of cards in the third quarter has so far fallen by 2,000 quarter on quarter, “in line with seasonality”. DM BOŚ analyst Mikołaj Stępień wrote on 21 August that there were 1.874 million active cards in Poland in August and that a stable figure in a seasonally weak summer suggests earlier sales growth remains healthy.
What this means at reception, not on the exchange
An independent club does not sell MultiSport. It honours it. The card operator collects the fee from the employer and the employee. The club is paid for a registered visit, at a rate set in its contract with the operator. Benefit Systems does not publish that rate in the stock-exchange report — it is individual. What is public is the scale: almost 1.88 million cards in Poland, and further growth.
On the same day, 28 August 2026, the iBody catalogue put the average gym pass in Warsaw at PLN 270–280 and a single entry at PLN 80–85. MultiSport was declared by 99 of 202 Warsaw venues. That is the backdrop, not any one club’s price list: a cardholder walks into a place where a local pass costs a sum that some people with a workplace benefit will not pay a second time from their own pocket.
A club that accepts the card fills the floor. It does not always fill the till to the same degree. A card visit and a membership visit look the same at the gate. They do not in the month-end settlement. If reception has the operator’s terminal, a membership notebook and a separate spreadsheet for classes, nobody after closing can say how many people at body pump came on their own fee and how many on a card tap.
The Benefit Systems chain has its own clubs and its own card programme. An independent venue has a partner contract and its own costs: rent, electricity, shower chemicals, coaches, treadmill servicing. When cards dip by two thousand nationwide in summer, a small club sees it differently: an empty 10 a.m. slot and the question of whether the same people return in September, or only a wave of cards from offices.
Example: a club with two studios and a card at the gate
Picture an independent club: free-weights floor, cardio, two class studios, a dozen or so group sessions a week, several coaches on contracts. MultiSport and FitProfit at the gate. Beside that — its own monthly passes, visit packs and personal training. A typical set-up: summer still more or less works, and after 1 September the grind begins.
Late August. Reception has a membership notebook, a class table in a spreadsheet, and a messenger thread in which coaches cancel groups or add names. The card terminal stands apart. Who came on a pass is known to whoever is on shift, if they had time to look. Who took a mat at 6 p.m. is known to the room when too many people are standing in it.
The first full week of September. After work a room for 16 has 22 people wanting in. Some arrived with a card, with no booking. A member who has paid for a pass walks away because they cannot get into the class they bought with the membership. The morning spin class has four people. The coach is still paid for the hour. The owner sees a packed evening and an empty morning and cannot say which group earns money and which only consumes the timetable.
This story does not need a new turnstile or a chain-style app at once. It needs one list of visits with a source — pass, operator card, walk-in ticket — and a studio calendar with a capacity limit. Reception then sees that 6 p.m. places were taken by card visits, and the paying member was left in the corridor. Without that, the club argues with the guest instead of changing the rule: the class is for people with a booking.
A card visit and the pass the club issued itself
Benefit Systems’ B2C memberships in Poland grew 27 per cent in a year, to 360,800. Cards grew 11 per cent, to 1,876,300. The chain therefore sells both a membership to its own clubs and access to thousands of partner venues. An independent gym sells only the latter, plus its own pass. The own pass is the only line where the price and the cost of a studio hour sit on the club’s side.
At reception the process looks simple. The guest taps a card or gives a name. The gate opens. The trouble starts in the evening, when nobody splits those two streams. The operator’s report arrives late, in a different layout from the membership notebook. The owner sees occupancy and does not see margin.
Off-the-shelf gym software usually handles a pass, an expiry date and a check-in. Some also treat “partner-card guest” as a separate type. It breaks when the club honours three operators, has a company pass for ten people, an eight-visit pack valid for 45 days, and the sauna as an add-on. Reception then goes back to the “exceptions” notebook, and after a month the exceptions are most of the traffic after 5 p.m.
A panel that ties the gate together does not have to replace the MultiSport terminal. The operator stays the operator. The club needs its own record: who entered, on what basis, at what time, into which zone. From that you can build a month: how many card visits, how many on a pass, how many walk-ins, how many pass-holders have not appeared in three weeks. Without that list, talk of “too many cards in the gym” stays a feeling from reception.
If the club has a few dozen regular members and one studio, a spreadsheet and discipline on shift will do. When two queues form at peak — pass and card — and someone is ringing about spin class in the background, the sheet falls behind. Not because Excel is bad. Because three sources of truth do not add up after closing.
September, the 6 p.m. peak and an empty gym at 10 a.m.
The company itself describes summer as seasonally weaker: a 2,000-card drop at the start of the third quarter, a stable base in August according to DM BOŚ. The club is left with July, when coaches’ rotas are full of holes, and September, when lockers suddenly run out.
After the holidays two streams return. Members with a pass who are back from leave and want their usual class. Office cardholders who trained less in July, or not at all, and tap the card after work in September. Both groups meet in the same room at 6 p.m. In the morning, when the office card has not yet left the open-plan floor, the studio stands empty.
A club that does not count occupancy by hour still hires a coach for 10 a.m. “because that is how it was last year” and adds a second class at 6.30 p.m. because people cannot get in in the evening. The coach’s hourly cost is the same. Revenue from the room is not. If the 6 p.m. class is open to every cardholder with no cap, a paying member is paying for comfort they do not get at 6 p.m.
A calendar with a place limit and a view of occupancy by hour is not a website ornament. It lets the club take some traffic off the evening group — a booking, a wait-list, a separate class at 7.15 p.m. — before reception starts turning people away at the door. It also shows that morning yoga has had five people for three weeks and that the problem is not a “weak coach”, but an hour the office card does not serve.
A chain with 296 clubs in Poland spreads that peak across many sites. An independent venue has one gate. That is why September hurts it more than it hurts the card operator. On the call Benefit Systems speaks of no dramatic change in consumer behaviour and of B2C membership growth in line with expectations. A partner club does not receive that growth in its own till automatically — it receives more feet on the mat.
Group classes, empty mats and a member in the corridor
Class sign-up in an independent club often lives beside the membership. Facebook, a message to the coach, a sheet on the studio door. Reception finds out the group is full when someone is already in indoor shoes. Or the other way round: twelve names on the list, seven people arrived, the coach runs a class for empty places.
No-shows in class are not a September whim. They are the result of a booking that costs nothing. A member books body pump “just in case”, does not cancel, and at 5.50 p.m. writes that they will stay at work. Their place does not go back on the list. Someone with a pass who wanted in was told at noon that it was full. A benefit card, with no booking, will still get in if the club does not enforce the cap at the door.
The same mechanism that other local services use to gather appointments in one calendar helps here — an online booking system is not a chain invention. A booking with a place limit, cancellation by a set hour, a reminder the day before. The mat then returns to the pool before the coach locks the room.
Ready-made gym programmes usually include class booking. Some require a partner-card guest to have an account in the club’s app as well. If they do not, reception writes them in by hand again, and the limit in the software lies. Then a “class module” does not help. A rule does: the studio takes a booking, whether the person arrived on a pass, a card or a ticket. The gate and the class list have to know about each other.
A club that already has a membership and class booking system and still loses September usually does not lack a feature. It has two databases: one in the software, one in the card terminal. Until a card visit lands on the same timeline as a booking, the room will be full in the coach’s eyes and empty in the spreadsheet’s.
Coaches, hours and a studio nobody closed
The coaches’ rota in a small club lives in a messenger app. Someone swaps Thursday, someone falls ill on Monday, someone puts spin in place of yoga because “people prefer it”. Reception prints a sheet for the door. The website still has a file from June. A cardholder arrives for a class that no longer exists.
Month-end pay is a separate argument. The coach counts hours from their own note. The office — from a sheet on the fridge. Two lines do not match: a cover session, and a group that was cancelled while the studio still opened because nobody took it off the timetable. The owner pays for an hour that did not happen, or does not pay for an hour that did.
A shared timetable in which a coach change drops straight onto reception and the booking list closes that gap. Hours for pay come from what actually ran in the studio, not from a message saying “we’ll sort it”. If a personal trainer rents a slot, the same calendar shows whether the room clashes with group fitness. The member does not need a training app for that. Reception needs a list of who has the key that hour.
A studio with two coaches can run this from a notebook. A club with a dozen groups and cover sessions cannot. Especially in September, when classes that dropped off the summer timetable suddenly return and coaches use up leftover leave. Then the lack of a shared calendar shows up in maps reviews: “I went at 7 a.m. and there was a note on the door that it was cancelled.”
Spreadsheet, off-the-shelf software, integration, a panel of your own
A spreadsheet is enough when the club has one studio, a fixed set of passes and traffic that reception can hold in its head. The owner already knows who has not been in for a month. The problem starts with a second reception shift, a second studio and a third card operator.
Fitness SaaS is a reasonable choice when the club fits the standard: a monthly pass, visits, a group timetable, a member app, payment online. There are plenty of those products. They charge a subscription per locker or per active member. For a club that is still building a base, that is often cheaper than commissioning a panel. For a club that has grown and has unusual packs, the subscription grows with success, and the exceptions still land in Excel beside the licence.
Integration makes sense when the club already has membership software and does not want to throw it out, and only lacks a card-visit source, a wait-list or coaches’ hours. The card operator’s terminal usually stays, because it is Benefit Systems’ or VanityStyle’s tool, not the club’s. You can add a record on the club’s side and pull in what the operator actually shares, instead of retyping a PDF after the month.
A dedicated panel pays when the process belongs to the club, not the other way round: several pass types, several operators, coaches on different terms, a second site, or the member file has to stay on the club’s server when the SaaS licence goes up. We do not scrap a working programme because “you must have your own”. First you see which stream — pass, card, classes, hours — does not meet the others. Only then the decision: extend what is there, or put those four things in one place.
A broader comparison of when off-the-shelf software stops adding up is not gym-specific. In a club you see it faster than in an office: the gate will not wait for a manual import from last week. The guest is standing there. The coach is standing there. The card has already been tapped.
What can be tied together before the club buys another notebook
Benefit Systems’ report of 20 August describes a market on which there will rather be more cards, not fewer. Potential of 2.5–2.8 million in Poland against 1.88 million today leaves room to grow. Club consolidation — according to the company’s management — is rather slowing. An independent venue will stay in that market as a card partner and as a seller of its own pass. Those two roles collide in the 6 p.m. studio if nobody splits them in the records.
GESOFT builds panels and applications around a specific flow, not around a chain’s feature catalogue. In the club from the example that means a few things from the earlier bottlenecks, not a new “fitness ecosystem”. A shared list of visits with a title: pass, card, ticket. Studio calendars with a cap and a booking. A coaches’ timetable from which the hour for pay is counted. A monthly report that shows which group eats cost and which leaves a margin.
A member app makes sense when the club really collects bookings and pass renewals on its own site. It does not make sense as the first spend while reception still does not know who came in. Truth on the shift first, convenience in the phone later. Android for the coach — only if the rota has to travel to a second site or a cover session, not sit in reception’s drawer.
September will not wait for a deployment. You can, however, spend two or three weeks writing down where visits come from, how a group is booked and how a coach reports an hour. From that it is clear whether it is enough to extend an off-the-shelf product, or whether the club is carrying a process the licence will not accept. A conversation about a panel without that list ends in the purchase of another tool beside the notebook.
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