Constructing a Decision Model for Health Club Members to Purchase Coaching Programs during the COVID-19 Epidemic

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 epidemic has affected the global sports industry to a certain extent, and health clubs are no exception. To avoid unsustainable operations, health clubs need to restructure their programs to suit members’ needs. Therefore, this study constructs a two-stage framework model to evaluate health club members’ purchase of coaching programs. The first stage is to construct a hierarchy of evaluation, using the modified Delphi method, to select suitable criteria and extended sub-criteria, and add and delete them through expert discussion. In the second stage, we use the pairwise comparison matrix to calculate the weight of each criterion and sub-criterion to influence each other. Next, we evaluate and compare physical, online and offline, and live-stream coaching programs, by using network hierarchy analysis to identify the best class purchase plan during the epidemic and provide relevant suggestions. The results of the study found that during the epidemic, the primary sales were for weight training among physical programs (0.314), and activity classes among online and offline programs (0.633) as well as live-stream coaching programs (0.280). These findings have implications for health clubs in deciding which mode they need to adopt for sustainable operations.