Swimming

There has been a renaissance of swimming within Leisure Connection, transforming it from the poor relation to a leading driver of the business – second only to fitness. This has led to a huge increase in revenue for the business as well as soaring participation levels.

The swimming success story began with the implementation of the Government’s free swimming scheme in 2008. More than 175,000 swimmers registered but since the withdrawal of the scheme in 2010 Leisure Connection has used local marketing strategies to continue to engage with the swimmers to ensure they continue to swim with Leisure Connection. We have developed a more customer friendly swimming programme, which has increased user participation by 33%.

Accessible offers have been developed for our award winning swimming lesson programme - Swim School. Pupils are encouraged to swim outside of classes with offers and rewards and Swim School participation has increased by 9% in two years taking the number of individuals (23,713) learning to swim with Leisure Connection to almost 26,000. Perhaps one of the biggest achievements is the turnaround in the participation in the adult swim programme by over 200% in 12 months

Swimming has been aligned with the success of fitness within the business and Leisure Connection has developed a specific swim personal training offer and package, which is proving popular.

Working in partnership with the ASA, Leisure Connection has successfully implemented a free swimming lesson campaign, which has over 300 funded courses for adult beginners, giving over 3,000 individuals the opportunity to become water confident or learn to swim.

We are proud of these successes because it’s against a swimming landscape that is struggling nationally and where participation levels are decreasing. We have implemented a clear business and marketing strategy, coupled with a fully integrated approach with the rest of the business to ensure the success of swimming.