I have experience on both sides: being involved with the set up of OpenActive while I was chief executive of London Sport, as well as now running one of the UK’s largest leisure operators. I’m a massive fan of open data, but that doesn’t mean to say that all of its uses are going to be positive immediately. At the moment I think it’s too early to say what impact aggregators will have on the health and fitness industry, as they still need to show more innovation to really get operators interested.

Health and fitness is a low margin business, so it isn’t viable for aggregators to follow the model of the travel industry by simply offering price comparison websites. Neither will it work if they just appeal to the people who are already active. For aggregators to gain a foothold they will either need to add value to the customer experience, or start mobilising the inactive population and grow the market for health clubs. If they successfully do this it will be a win-win, but they need to be more creative to make this happen.

The consumer experience always improves in markets where aggregators exist because customers love the transparency and independence they provide through the reviews they carry.

We’re seeing real momentum in this area at the moment: we even had one of the board members of one of our largest operators logging in daily, so he knew exactly what was going on in the clubs and could make sure the GMs knew what they needed to improve.

Operators need to take the time to understand the variations before deciding which model is right for their business.

Since the fitness sector is late to adopt aggregators there are lots of reference points in other industries, making it easier to compare models. As the first company, globally, to attempt to aggregate fitness, PayAsUGym benefitted from being able to study models in other sectors to understand best practise. We believe it’s important to always focus on developing a fair, collaborative and sustainable version of aggregation, which grows the market and builds trust with our operator partners.

Going forward, a split of opinion regarding aggregators is likely to remain. Operators who embrace consumer choice, recognise the desire for increased flexibility and are confident their services will stand up to public scrutiny will proactively engage with aggregators, which will result in them reaching new customers and growing their business. Opponents of aggregators will spread fear, uncertainty and doubt into the market, in the hope of maintaining the status quo. Ultimately the customer will decide how they wish to engage with fitness and we can see evidence of this within our own sector.

When compared with other industries, the health and fitness sector is being cautious with its adoption of aggregators, especially on the public side.

This caution is understandable: operators want to avoid becoming powerless and being reduced to only being the supply side of a marketing partnership.

They’re concerned about the cannibalisation of their user base and being moved further away from direct digital interaction with the consumer.

We understand why they feel this way, because the hospitality industry hasn’t necessarily had a good time at the hands of aggregators. Among a few things, the price transparency has hurt undifferentiated hotels. While undifferentiated health clubs could potentially be hurt in the same way, the fact that fitness searches are generally hyper-local, as opposed to global, means there is possibly less of a threat.

One advantage of aggregators is that they are thinking creatively about the end user, and how to create engagement tools and active online communities. They should be seen as another marketing channel, to be controlled and measured in the same way as all other marketing channels. They can help operators to find those people who never go to gyms.

To this end, Public Health England is doing some innovative work around the Change4Life campaign, having just launched an activity finder powered by open data and ditching static databases.

We’re only at the very early stages of finding out what aggregators could do for the industry and I believe that, when used correctly, they have so much potential to create value, as long as operators find ways of staying in control.

The advantage of aggregators is that they can bring new people to your front door. The disadvantage is that they weaken the relationship between club and customer and, through aggressive discounting to acquire customers, dilute the yield, which leads to lower profitability, service and re-investment levels.

Aggregators fit more comfortably with PAYG type models, where customers are more likely to shop around. In this case they can add value by offering convenience and value to customers, by providing a single buying/booking platform.

There’s much talk in our industry about improving retention. At the heart of this lies giving people great value for money and building a relationship with them, not making one-off sales, as with an airline.

As long as the plane goes from A to B, I’m happy to choose the option that best suits me from a price, quality or timing point of view. In this scenario aggregators add genuine value, by making a complex choice simpler. This isn’t the case with health clubs, so the long-term added value of aggregators to the customers in our sector is less clear to me.

The jury is also out on whether they’ll be profitable in the long term. As a generalisation, they’re trying to build scale and market share by discounting. In doing so, they’re distorting the market in what’s essentially a fixed-cost business.

I doubt many will invest in the fabric of clubs, or the people and talent needed to sustain great experiences for members.

My view on this might change, if and when market leaders emerge who charge a consistent level of pricing that reflects the cost of delivery of good service, but net-net, I don’t think aggregators are a positive thing for the industry.

We all accept and use aggregators to book restaurants, flights and hotels so why not also use them for fitness and sports activities?

Sports, particularly, and fitness – until the low cost brands arrived – were not very transparent to the consumer, so it was only natural that entrepreneurs looked at what was being achieved in other leisure sectors and tried to emulate it.

Most came up with business plans that put them between the consumer and operators, but it’s difficult for the relationship to flourish in an industry where operators don’t often have live inventory feeds or the ability to connect the aggregator into their booking system.

We’re currently tracking around 20 aggregators and most will either fail or need to change their business plan.

It’s difficult to find the sweet spot, so consumer, operator and aggregator are all happy. Some will find the magic formula, and will help drive new business and in return they’ll survive and thrive. There needs to be a win-win-win and you don’t get that by deep discounting.