At Virgin Active, we always try to give you the best possible service, but with frequent power outages, we’re faced with huge challenges keeping up full-service levels.
We know Eskom’s loadshedding is super disruptive – it affects ALL aspects of life from work to workouts. We don’t want you to miss out on your stress-busting workouts so if your home club is affected, you’re welcome to train at a nearby club. We communicate via our app, so make sure you’ve downloaded it and activated push notifications to get all relevant notifications.
My club is loadshedding, what now?
We’ll only close a club when we feel your safety and security is compromised. During daylight hours, your club will stay open so all equipment not impacted by loadshedding can be used.
When loadshedding strikes, you’re welcome to come and train at another of our clubs that isn’t being affected. We’ve put a list together that tells you which of our clubs fall into which zones so it makes planning a bit easier when you’re checking EskomSePush or whichever loadshedding app you use: Check which zones our clubs fall into
You’re welcome to train at any club, at any time (excl. Collection) during loadshedding stage 4 & up. And for stages 1 – 3, if your club is experiencing loadshedding, you’re welcome to pop into your next nearest club.
If there isn’t another club nearby, or if you can’t get to another club, we’ve got 400+ on-demand workouts that you can do from the comfort of your home or outdoors using little to no equipment. We’ve even got a tasty little Loadshedding Workout Series lined up for you – again, make sure you’ve got our app to access the workouts.
But why no generators?
Some of our clubs use medium-sized generators to power lighting and other essential services, but the size of generator needed to provide full power for all our facilities and the cost of the diesel just wouldn’t be feasible and would impact of membership fees. We don’t want that. Here is a list of clubs with generators and info on what the generators power.
We’re also conscious of the impact of the noise and exhaust pollution made by the generators- they’re simply not a sustainable, long-term option.
Like so many South Africans, we have been hopelessly optimistic that loadshedding would finally end but Eskom has proven us wrong. If anything, it’s anticipated loadshedding will increase. Our engineering team is exploring inverter systems, but before committing to funding and rolling this out as a longer-term solution, we are running a pilot programme to ensure viability and feasibility. If you think about the cost of an inverter system in your own home, you can imagine the requirements for something the size of one of our clubs…. in some clubs, a system could cost up to almost R4 million. This gives you insight into why we pilot something like this before committing to a wider rollout.
Let’s do loadshedding together
We know the situation is not ideal, we are in this together. As always, if you have any questions or need some info, give us a call on 0860 200 911 and we’ll do everything we can to help.