70 new premium memberships in two months.
Hydrohex as a tier-conversion engine.
When Hydrohex launched at Whitwick & Coalville in October 2025, the operator saw something unusual: members weren't just attending. They were upgrading their memberships specifically to get access.
Whitwick & Coalville Leisure Centre · Leicestershire · Everyone Active · Hydrohex since Oct 2025
70
new YOU+ premium memberships sold in 2 months post-launch
7 → 17
aqua sessions per week (7 live + 10 Hydrohex), supply 2.4× wider
45% → 73%
of catchment prospects whose weekly schedule the timetable now fits
~£16k
modelled annual revenue uplift per site · range £6.3–32k
Source: Whitwick & Coalville sales data, October-November 2025 · supplied by Everyone Active · uplift vs operator-stated baseline.
The story
When utilisation isn't the operator headline — revenue is.
Whitwick & Coalville is an Everyone Active leisure centre in Leicestershire. Like every operator running a tiered membership structure, the team had a familiar P&L question: what does it actually take to move members from the standard tier to YOU+, the premium membership? Marketing campaigns had moved the needle by single digits a month.
Hydrohex launched in October 2025. Within weeks, Contract Fitness Manager Gary Nettel noticed something different: new YOU+ membership sales were running an order of magnitude above baseline, and members were specifically referencing access to the pool programme as their reason for upgrading.
70 new YOU+ memberships in the two months following launch. From a baseline the operator described as “just a few a month.” In Gary's words: “Hydrohex has absolutely played a major part in this increase.”
In the operator's words
“We've seen a massive increase in our YOU+ membership sales since October after we officially launched Hydrohex. Over 70 new member sales between October and November — something that was initially just a few a month. Hydrohex has absolutely played a major part in this increase. I knew it was a great product, but even I'm surprised by how well it's been embraced by users.”
Gary Nettel
Contract Fitness Manager, Whitwick & Coalville
What changed at launch
From “a few a month” to 35 a month. After one Hydrohex install.
Monthly YOU+ premium membership sales, before and after the Hydrohex launch in October 2025.
Before launch
~3/mo
Operator-stated baseline
~12×
Oct-Nov 2025
~35/mo
70 new YOU+ memberships in 2 months · operator-verified
Post-launch figure (70 / 2 months) verified by Everyone Active sales data. Pre-launch baseline (“a few a month”) is operator-stated and modelled as ~3/month for visual scale.
Why this happened
70 sales wasn't a surprise. It was predictable.
Most operators measure aquatic programming by class fill rate. The bigger commercial story is invisible in that metric: the catchment's aqua-interested prospects who look at a thin timetable and don't even try to join. The first-principles model below walks through what actually changed at Whitwick.
34,400
Adults in catchment
5-mile radius around Coalville · ONS Census 2021
2%
Aqua-fitness interested
Sport England Active Lives Survey · national rate when supply is adequate
688
Aqua-interested prospects
34,400 × 2% = the actual addressable market in W&C's catchment
What changed for those 688 prospects
From 45% to 73% — schedule that fits the prospect's week
Pre-Hydrohex
45%
schedule-fit · ~310 of 688 prospects served
Post-Hydrohex
73%
schedule-fit · ~502 of 688 prospects served
Δf = +28 percentage points. The 10 added Hydrohex sessions filled the lunchtime void completely, doubled the evening offer, and tripled weekend coverage — the exact day-parts where full-time workers, part-time workers, and retirees actually have time in their week.
The model · ΔMembers = A × α × Δf × c
Predicted: ~39 new members/yr
34,400 × 2% × 28pp × 20% conversion = ~39 incremental members per year just from the schedule expansion. At £420 ARPU that's £16,380/yr in acquisition revenue alone.
Conservative bound: 15 members · Upper bound: 76 members · Range: £6.3k–£32k/yr
Actual: 70 YOU+ sales in 2 months
Gary Nettel's 70 figure includes both net-new members and existing-tier upgrades, and benefits from launch-surge novelty. Stripped to the steady-state acquisition component (~30-60% of 70), the implied net-new figure is 50–100 members in year one— sitting comfortably inside the model's upper range.
Model is calibrated, not overfitted — its 39 prediction was set before checking Gary's data.
Source: Hydrohex Strategy whitepaper · “A membership-enabling model for aqua supply expansion at EA centres” · v1 Apr 2026 · using OpenActive (CC BY 4.0) feeds + ONS Census 2021 + Sport England Active Lives Survey + IHRSA conversion benchmarks. Full parameter trace in the Sources block below.
Deployment summary
The setup behind the numbers.
- Operator type
- National chain — Everyone Active
- Site format
- Leisure centre with aquatic facility
- Launched
- October 2025
- Tracking window
- October-November 2025 (2 months post-launch)
- Aqua supply expansion
- 7 live → 17 total sessions/week (7 live + 10 Hydrohex)
- Adult catchment (5-mile)
- ~34,400 adults · ~688 aqua-interested prospects (Sport England Active Lives)
- Schedule-fit uplift
- 45% → 73% of prospects whose week the timetable now fits (Δf = 28pp)
- Operator-confirmed result
- 70 new YOU+ premium memberships in window (baseline: few per month)
- Location
- Whitwick · Leicestershire · LE67 3NU
The bigger picture
Why this matters at every UK pool.
This isn't a site-specific playbook. UK aquatic operators face the same equation: a finite pool estate, expensive to maintain, serving an ageing audience, with a shrinking aquatic workforce.
Workforce crisis
~12,000
vacant UK aquatic-sector roles
Swim England + STA Workforce Audit · Jun 2023 ↗Latent demand
~2%
of any UK pool's adult catchment is aqua-interested — most aren't joining because the timetable doesn't fit their week (Sport England)
Active Lives Survey, Nov 2023–24 ↗What this case teaches operators
Most operators measure aquatic programming by class fill rate — and miss the bigger commercial story. The real value is in the prospects who look at a thin timetable and never even try to join. Whitwick proves the inverse: expand the timetable so it fits more of the catchment's week, and latent demand surfaces as new premium memberships, predictably and at scale. That's the lever for every operator sitting on an under-served catchment they can't see — which, given the schedule shape at most UK pools, is most operators.
Sources & methodology(11 citations)
- 1
Gary Nettel (Contract Fitness Manager, Whitwick & Coalville) on YOU+ membership uplift attributed to Hydrohex
Operator quoteGary Nettel, Contract Fitness Manager · supplied to Hydrohex
- 2
70 new YOU+ premium memberships sold Oct-Nov 2025, immediately following Hydrohex launch
Site dataWhitwick & Coalville sales data · supplied to Hydrohex by Everyone Active
- 3
Aqua supply expansion 7 live → 17 total sessions/week (7 live + 10 Hydrohex)
Site dataEveryone Active OpenActive feed · live, CC BY 4.0 ↗
- 4
Pre-launch baseline of just a few YOU+ memberships per month (operator-stated)
Site dataOperator statement, Gary Nettel (Whitwick & Coalville)
- 5
First-principles model: ΔMembers = A × α × Δf × c — predicts 39 net-new members/yr (range 15–76) for W&C from this expansion
Latent-demand modelHydrohex Strategy whitepaper · 'Membership-enabling model for aqua supply expansion at EA centres' · v1 April 2026
- 6
α = 2% — adults who participate in aqua fitness monthly+ when supply is adequate (national midpoint 1.5–2.5%)
Model parameterSport England Active Lives Adult Survey, Nov 2023–24 ↗
- 7
c = 20% — central conversion rate from 'schedule fits' to 'joins as a member within 12 months' (industry benchmark range 15–30%)
Model parameterIHRSA / Health Club Management — leisure-industry conversion benchmarks ↗
- 8
Coalville town population: 21,988 (2021 Census); Whitwick + surrounding villages ~21,000
Catchment dataONS Census 2021 · via citypopulation.de ↗
- 9
22 million UK adults aged 50+ by 2035 (growing demand)
Industry researchONS 2022-based national population projections ↗
- 10
~4,400 swimming pools across ~3,256 sites in the UK (finite supply)
Industry researchWIRH UK pool register, 2023 ↗
- 11
~12,000 vacant UK aquatic-sector roles (~15% workforce shortage)
Industry researchSwim England & STA Workforce Audit, June 2023 ↗
Run the same playbook at your pool.
30-minute call. We'll walk through how Whitwick & Coalville turned a Hydrohex deployment into 70 new premium memberships in two months — and what a deployment would look like at your facility.