At the Märjamaa Municipality Sports Centre, people can now access the gym even when the building is otherwise locked and no staff are on site. Instead of the old chip-card system, access, booking, and payment now happen via mobile phone, and the centre always knows who is using the rooms and when.
The change started with two practical challenges. The centre was closed during holidays, and on weekends the door didn’t open until ten o’clock. That raised the question — why shouldn’t people be able to get into the gym at six in the morning too?
Together with Autlio, a solution was found. An automatic access and payment system now allows people to train whenever suits them, even in the early morning hours, when the building is actually locked.
Mart Tilk, head of the Märjamaa Municipality Sports Centre, explained that the biggest win is flexibility — especially during the summer.
“When people drive out from the city to the countryside, their training routine doesn’t have to break. In the city you’re used to a fixed training time, but the countryside has its own challenges. Automatic access gives new customers the chance to train whenever it suits them.”
The impact goes both ways. The customer gets to train at a time that suits them, and the centre saves on staffing and administrative costs. When there are fewer customers, there’s no point keeping an administrator on site all day — the system takes care of access, booking, and billing on its own.
“Even one customer is a customer to us,” Tilk added. “Looking at the morning hours, we’ve already gained a couple of extra customers a day. These matter — this way, no one is left without the service simply because the door is locked.”
Märjamaa isn’t the only one. More and more municipal sports centres are moving in this direction — automatic access is replacing the old cash-register and card system and making halls more easily accessible to people. A similar solution was recently adopted by the school sports halls of Elva Municipality in Rannu, Puhja, and Rõngu, as well as Tori Municipality and Peipsiääre Municipality. That simply means more opportunities to stay active.
Autlio was responsible for the technology behind the solution, whose goal is to make Estonia’s sports centres smart — one facility at a time.