Kensington Community Aquatic and Recreation Centre

“As a local resident, I wanted this centre to be great, but this has truly gone from bad to worse since it opened. The centre offered early bird membership with a 6 month minimum lock-in term, on the basis that there were accessible evening group classes and 24 hour gym access. The centre opened late September 2025 and as at mid-January we still have no 24 hour gym access. The centre shuts at 6pm on weekends and they have not resumed "extended" opening hours in lieu of 24 hour access after Christmas/New Year holidays. They have also recently shelled out their group classes and no longer offer reformer pilates (which is an additional charge of $30 a fortnight) after 6:30pm, when the original scheduling had fantastic classes at 6pm, 7pm and 8pm. Not everybody can make early morning classes and this was an initial selling point for me. I am now paying $90.30 a fortnight for broken promises thanks to their predatory and materially misleading advertising. Customer service is non-existent, and if you get a reply it's evident they haven't actually read and interpreted your question or concern. While the instructors for the group classes I attended while their schedule was accessible were fantastic, I would not be actively recommending anyone lock themselves in to a membership at this facility.”

“For $70m I expected more. It should be a 24/7 gym but for some reason it isn’t (it should be coming but no one knows when). There’s a small gym with limited equipment which makes access difficult when busy (to make it worse they run classes in the gym that take over some equipment further limiting access). The new treadmills are buggy (go into error mode or offline before or during use). The treadmills are situated in front of floor to ceiling windows with no blinds so that you are blinded by the afternoon sun. If you need to talk to a staff member they are seldom available. Forget spin classes ther’s no cycling studio. There’s no sauna or spas. Speakers in the centre repeat a no cellular signal message all day which is quite annoying. The few cycles in the gym have some recorded classes but the videos resolution is so poor you can’t see anything. To top it off the membership is more expensive then the nearby Ascot Vale Leisure Centre that, though older, is far better equipped, has spin studio, has saunas and spa, a larger cafe and keeps open for longer and the staff are always on hand when needed. The Kensington Recreation Centre needs to significantly improve or cut its prices to reflect its more limited service.”

“Was looking through the $0 sign-up cost during New Year, look through everything and finally decided not to sign up and did not provide any of my billing confirmation to them. ZERO. A week later, lady from the center called me up and told me to pay my outstanding fees. I was like... Why are they charging me when I did not even provide any billing info? Turns out after agreeing to their T&C, you agree to pay the invoices, even without providing your credit card information. It's just like you added items from online shopping into your cart because you're interested, and then the seller asked you to pay for it already while you were just browsing. Absolutely ridiculous. Not helping with the fact that they were constantly sending "outstanding invoices" emails to my side, while telling me to please provide my card information so they can charge me. Forget about it. You guys may have the state of the arts this, the best that, etc but this alone, is a barrier you've erected yourselves to deter customers away from your center. You've lost the trust from your customers, and fair to say although this center is close by in Kensington, I would rather travel a little further to Flemington/other subburbs for gym.”

“Very disappointed in this facility. I took my granddaughter down today. Children’s pool was closed, but wasn’t told this when we paid to get in. Took my granddaughter down into the large pool that was really cold. Then no hot chips even available at what was described as a top cafe.Was even a battle to sit outside in the sun afterwards to warm up. The lifeguard staff were very good though. Hopefully this is just teething problems an it improves.”