One Climbing Gym Membership to Rule Them All

Last Updated on: 31st March 2023, 10:51 am

One of the reasons I don’t have a climbing gym membership (other than the fact that it’s expensive and that I don’t love climbing in the gym) is that I travel a lot. I’d be able to use the gym when I’m home, but that doesn’t do me any good when I’m on the road. What if I could climb at any gym in the country with just my one membership?

I imagine it’d work something like this: Let’s say that a normal climbing gym membership to your home gym costs $50 per month. A “climb anywhere” pass that is good for any climbing gym would $70, so a $20 premium. That $20 goes into a big pool of money controlled by the company that runs the “climb anywhere” pass system, along with the $20 of every other climber that’s signed up. Every time a climber visits a gym that isn’t his home gym, it’s tallied by the “climb anywhere” company. At the end of the month, all of the tallies are calculated, and each gym in the system is given an amount from the $20 membership pool proportionate to how often its gym was used by climbers in the program. So if a particular gym has visits by a quarter of all of the climbers in the program, it would get a quarter of the membership pool money. Make sense?

What do you think? Would something like this work? There might have to be limits to the number of non-home gym visits you get; could be something like 4 per month.

I’m not a climbing gym owner, so I don’t know if the numbers I suggested here make sense, but surely there’s a way (or more specifically, a $$ number) to make it make it financially worthwhile for climbing gyms?