2016: An active year for Vitality

Vitality has had an extremely exciting – and busy – year in 2016. We launched one of the most successful benefits in Vitality history – Vitality Active Rewards. And with it we introduced our members to Apple Watch, gave them even more reason to join the gym, and soon we’ll be making Vitality Active Rewards even more rewarding with cash back on flights. We also launched a first in the country – the state-of-the-art teaching and dining kitchen, HealthyFood Studio. Finally, we’ve made some very positive updates to the ways we interact with our members and how they interact with us.

But first things first …

Vitality Active Rewards gets Vitality members moving

Late last year, we launched our newest free benefit, Vitality Active Rewards, which rewards our members with a free drink from one of our partners every week for getting active. Thus far, more than 200 000 of our members have signed up to Vitality Active Rewards and they are working out 25% more, making this one of our most successful benefits ever.

With the success of the programme, we launched the Vitality Active Rewards with Apple Watch – Vitality members can fully fund an Apple Watch by meeting all their weekly Vitality Active Rewards goals for 24 months. The amount members pay for their Apple Watch is based on achieving weekly fitness goals. If they meet all their Vitality Active Rewards goals in a month, the monthly amount for the Apple Watch will be funded in full.

We are also giving our members the opportunity to earn an additional 25% cash back on their monthly gym fees if they achieve all four of their weekly Vitality Active Rewards goals. The Gym Booster benefit means that we reward our most active members with up to 100% off their monthly gyms fees. With Vitality Active Rewards, our members are getting even more active, and getting even more rewarded every week.

You may have noticed that the 155 West campus looks a little different

And there’s a good reason. We launched a state-of-the-art Vitality HealthyFood Studio in May – in partnership with Woolworths, Prue Leith Chefs Academy, KitchenAid and Whirlpool. The kitchen is focused on empowering Vitality members and the general public to prepare fresh foods from scratch with seasonal ingredients. The teaching and dining kitchen is now officially open to the public and inspiring a life-long love of healthy, appetising cooking every day.

Some of the courses on offer include: everything fish, delicious desserts, all about veggies, seasonal delights, food with friends, good food on-the-go and much more to inspire the masterchef in everyone! Keep an eye open for our new kids’ cooking course, and an Olympics-inspired course.

We’re digitising the conversation

This year one of our most important shifts has been to a new model of servicing, where we help our members to help themselves. We’ve built a range of tools on the website, from troubleshooting pages, the gym tracker, and the new Vitality points monitor. We have also introduced a brand new way for members to work out how many Vitality fitness points they can earn for various workouts using our fitness device points calculator, that can be found on our fitness pages.

Looking forward

In the next few months, we will be making Vitality Active Rewards even more rewarding by adding a Flight Booster benefit to Vitality Active Rewards, where members can earn additional cash back on the base fare of the flights they book through Vitality by achieving their weekly fitness goals. Keep an eye out for that.

We will also continue to dazzle and delight our members with the engaging content in our Vitality newsletters and on our Facebook page.

Finally, all of us in Vitality are looking forward to the Olympics – we’re abuzz with the news of our sponsorship of the South African Olympic Team. Discovery Vitality is now the official wellness provider to the South African Olympic team and we’re looking forward to launching some amazing ways to support the team in August. Wishing our Vitality ambassador Chad le Clos all the best for Rio in August.

We look forward to Vitality being even more exciting – and rewarding – than ever before.