Late Cancel/No-Show Policy FAQ

All TNYA practices must be booked on Mindbody in advance. If you book a practice on Mindbody and cancel less than 2 hours before the practice, or just fail to show up to the practice, you will be charged as if you attended the practice.

In addition, if you are a no-show, you will be charged an additional $20 fee on top of paying for the practice as if you attended. 

There is! You can do it directly on your phone or via our Mindbody store.

Yes. Our coaches cannot properly prepare for practices at these sports if they do not have an accurate sense of numbers in advance of the practice.

What it says on the tin: not showing up to the practice at all. If you show up and the coach checks you in – even if you show up very late – you are not a no-show.

Note that for purposes of reserving your spot at the practice, our walk-up deadline is 10 minutes after practice start. That means if we have a walk-up, they’ll get your space after the 10 minute mark. But if they do, and you then show up, you won’t be counted as a no-show (though you may not be able to swim).

Note that if you arrive more than 10 minutes late, even if the coach checks you in, the coach may refuse to allow you to join the practice if doing so would unduly disrupt the practice. In particular, if the pool is full, it may not be possible for your to safely warm up without creating too great a disruption to the practice. On the bright side, you will still avoid the fee.

Because a late cancel still allows a waitlisted member to join the practice: when you late cancel, Mindbody sends out a text blast to all persons on the waitlist and the first to respond affirmatively gets your space. If you simply don’t show up, there’s no opportunity to fill your slot.

We have still set a late cancel deadline at 2 hours with what amounts to a lesser penalty (losing that practice credit) because recent surveys of the membership reveal that 50% of our members cannot attend a practice if given less than two hours’ notice that they can attend practice. Conversely, more than 70% of members reported that they would be able to attend practice so long as they were given two hours warning or more.

In other words, a late cancel likely harms the team, while a no-show definitely harms the team. This difference informs the difference in penalty.

If you do not think you will be able to get to the practice within 10 minutes of the start time, you should late cancel. You will still be charged as if you attended the practice, but you won’t be penalized otherwise. You can late cancel directly on your smartphone if you download the app.

Yes, there are two.

First, everybody gets one “free” no-show per membership year. Your membership year is the year beginning the day you joined the team as a paid member, or, if you’re a trial member, the start of your trial. If you no-show as a trial member, you still get a free no-show when you upgrade to paid membership.

Second, we will not charge any penalty (whether deducting a practice or adding a late/no-show fee) if your no-show happened under extenuating circumstances.

We understand that New York City is not the easiest city to get around and Mindbody is not the most supple booking system; if you miss a practice because of a subway SNAFU or don’t cancel on time because Mindbody refuses to work, or are added from the waitlist less than 2 hours before the practice, or have any other good reason, you can respond to your late cancel/no-show email (or write directly to mail@tnya.org) explaining the situation within one week of the charge and if we agree that it’s a good reason (we usually do), we will waive the fee.

After one full week elapses from the date of your no-show or late cancel, we will review the attendance records from that week and apply a charge directly to your credit card on file with Mindbody. 

100% of the no-show fee revenue we raise goes to the Paul Fortoul Fellowship Fund, which supports low-income New Yorkers who cannot otherwise afford to swim, scrimmage, dance, or dive with us. 

In 2023, where there were no penalties for no-shows beyond losing your practice payments, TNYA experienced 913 no-shows. 

Although this number is high, it was concentrated in a very small number of members. In 2023 TNYA had 350 members; 12% of all TNYA members (41 people) were responsible for 56% of all no-shows. 

Meanwhile 42% of all no-shows were one-offs. Under the “one free no-show” exception, none of these no-shows would have paid the penalty. All in all, we anticipate fewer than 5% of TNYA members will actually be charged a no-show penalty, at most, in the coming year.

Many fitness and other businesses are charging no-show fees to recover the opportunity cost represented by the no-show. Businesses charge no-show fees to recover opportunity cost only because a business is fundamentally indifferent to whether its services are being used – the important thing is that the resources expended to provide the services are recouped with an appropriate margin of profit. 

TNYA is different. We don’t make profit; our bylaws actually prevent us from running up large surpluses. Our purpose is to maximize the LGBTQ+-inclusive swimming opportunities for New Yorkers. So even if we are paid for a given swim slot, if a swim slot is going to waste (that is, there was someone who wanted to take that slot and was denied it), we are not fulfilling our mission.

Finding space for swimming in New York is painfully difficult right now owing to a collapse in pool supply, itself a knock-on effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. We owe it to our members and our fellow New Yorkers to ensure that as many people as possible can swim with us, because there are so few alternatives left.

So how to maximize space utilization for the New Yorkers we serve? We have observed that simply requiring members to forfeit their payment for a practice is not providing sufficient disincentive for no-shows: as noted above, almost 1,000 practice opportunities were lost thanks to no-shows in just one year. There is also the problem of our unlimited subscriptions, which of course inflict no marginal cost on no-showers.

One possible non-financial penalty the Board considered was simply to suspend the membership of perennial no-showers (which frees up practice space on its own). But we felt a campaign of mass suspensions would generate more anger and legal risk for the team than other alternatives, not least because it is very difficult to avoid drawing arbitrary lines about how many no-shows is too many. 

Instead, we settled on the industry-standard no-show fee as the best way to discourage no-shows. A positive side-effect of the fee is that it generates revenue we can use to further increase access, but we would be delighted if it raised $0 and simply killed off no-shows.

There is, although it ultimately ends up also being based on our charitable mission and values. 

Unlike a restaurant or barbershop that charges people at the time the service is delivered, the vast bulk of TNYA’s revenue comes from subscriptions – that is, folks who pay for a month’s worth of practices in advance. When a subscriber cannot get into a practice, they either downgrade or cancel their subscription. So although the practice slot is paid for by charging the no-show the cost of attendance (or drawing on their subscription), the additional economic harm inflicted on the team by a subscriber being pushed to downgrade their subscription has not been covered.

Of course, the size of the waitlist outnumbers the number of no-shows, so even if everyone showed up we would still have downgrading pressure. But our aim right now is to minimize that downgrading pressure, and the best way to minimize that pressure is to maximize utilization of popular practice slots.

Gyms faced with overcrowding tend to respond by limiting membership sales and capping the overall number of members (either directly or indirectly by raising prices). But capping the overall number of members—or raising rates to capture more revenue from the remaining subscribers—are both acts in tension with TNYA’s charitable mission of making aquatics as accessible as possible to as many LGBTQ+ and allied New Yorkers as possible. 

So a no-show fee (which statistically will affect fewer than 5% of members) is the most efficient way for us to minimize as much as possible the subscription downgrading pressure created by overcrowding without capping overall member numbers or raising rates.

We’d really rather you didn’t. Instead, we welcome a dialogue which you can initiate directly with mail@tnya.org to work out our disagreements amicably. 

If you insist, however, we will respond in several ways. 

First, whenever you dispute a credit card charge with your bank, TNYA is sent a notice of dispute and invited to file an opposition. We do this as a matter of course; if we don’t, we risk being charged a penalty by the credit card operator and have to pass the cost of those penalties on to our members. So your filing a dispute with your bank is unfortunately just the starting gun for a quasi-legal dispute with TNYA that will almost certainly cost all of us far more in emotional strain than $20.

Second, even if the bank were to side with you, that would have no bearing on your legal relationship with TNYA, which now includes an arrearage of at least $20. Per our bylaws, we have the right to suspend or cancel your membership if you do not repay that arrearage.

Because this is America, it is probably worth adding that any lawsuit you chose to file over this issue (why? why?!) would need to comply with the pre-litigation dispute resolution provisions of our Participation Agreement. Needless to say, we adopted this policy after carefully considering its legal permissibility and after receiving legal advice, and are confident that the courts will agree with us that it is wholly within our rights to impose.

Unlike for-profit gyms—or even other not-for-profit sports teams—TNYA is a direct democracy that gives its members the right of initiative and the right to override the Board of Directors. If you believe this policy is wrong for TNYA, you can file a petition with the Board (signed by 10% of the membership, which is usually between 40-50 paid members) to compel the calling of a special membership meeting where, if a majority of the members voting making up at least 10% of the entire membership agree with you, the Board’s imposition of the policy can be overridden.

We are also a representative democracy where at least 40% of the Board must go up for reelection every year. It is perfectly legitimate for you to vote for or withhold your vote for a given director candidate based on their stance on this policy – or run for the Board yourself.

The Board has adopted this policy because we believe it is in the best interests of the team. But the best judge of the team’s best interest is ultimately you, our members. We welcome your feedback or your participation in our democratic process, as you prefer.

Please feel free to contact us at mail@tnya.org.