Eric P.
Yelp
I wanted to like Equinox. I believe in paying more for a quality experience, but the experience I had just wasn't worth what I got.
Signing Up: They have you meet with a membership advisor who was mostly nice and explained the various services to me. I was only signing up so I could get a personal trainer for a while and learn some good workouts from them so I could eventually work out on my own. Due to the high cost of PT sessions, I knew it would be a short-term thing, so when I started going through the payment process, I balked when she said I had to commit to a full year, and they could only cancel before that if I were moving away or had a medical issue. We haggled for a bit and she eventually said that if I wanted to cancel before the full year, "we could work something out". I gave her my credit card.
Facilities: The gym itself is very nice. Clean locker rooms, good equipment, and a couple of studios for classes that you can use for your own thing when there's no class in session.
Personal Training: I had a Tier II and a Tier III trainer. Both of them give you some damn good workouts. My Tier II trainer had a great attitude and was fun to work with, though I asked him to e-mail me the workout plan for that day after each session so I could study it and learn how to work out on my own, and he said he would, but never did. The other trainer was friendly and tried to make it work but probably just wasn't the optimal personality fit. And he really really did not understand how I could possibly be a vegan. He tried to put on a brave face when adjusting his nutrition advice for me, but you could tell he had zero respect for the vegan diet. So overall, I got some good workouts in, but that's about it.
Using the Equipment By Yourself: I never did this, but I can confirm what other reviewers mentioned about how personal trainers get really annoyed with other members when they're working with a client and they can't use the exact machine they want. It was great for me, because I was the one with the trainer, but I felt bad when my trainers swept in as soon as someone stepped away or tried to hog equipment for a while for when we came back to it, even when we were off using a different machine.
Cancellation: I made sure to cancel well ahead of the year's "obligation" was up (because after I stopped training, I was paying $150/month for a gym I didn't go to) so I didn't run into the you-have-to-actively-cancel-45-days-before-or-we'll-renew-your-membership-for-another-year issue that other people ran into. The person who I dealt with for cancellation confirmed that I absolutely could not cancel ahead of my year's obligation unless the aforementioned reasons applied, confirming that the signup person was lying to me. So the best I could do was make sure that once the year was up, my membership was over. You have to contact someone and then go in and sign a cancellation form to make that happen.
Overall, the shady business practices around membership and the fact that my trainers were very much on board with "give a man a fish and feed him for a day", but not so much with the "teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" (which was what I really wanted), means that I can't give this place more than two stars. Get P90X and work out at home; it's a hell of a lot cheaper and likely more effective.