WordPress Event Ticketing

At its core, Tickera is an event ticketing system. It’s built for selling tickets, managing access, and checking people in - quickly, reliably, and without drama. That’s what it does best.

But once you strip the word “event” down to what it really means, it becomes clear that you can use Tickera for much more than just concerts or conferences. A ticket is simply a rule-based permission to enter somewhere. That’s exactly what a gym or fitness centre membership is and why you can use Tickera as gym membership system.

With the right setup, Tickera works comfortably as a membership system for gyms, fitness studios, training centres, and other businesses that need to control access over time.

The basic idea

From the customer’s perspective, nothing feels unusual or complicated.

They choose a membership on your website, complete the purchase, and receive a digital membership card. That card is actually a Tickera ticket with a QR code or barcode. Most people keep it on their phone, some print it, and both options work just fine.

Each time they visit your gym or studio, they show that ticket at the front desk. You scan it. Tickera checks whether it’s valid at that moment. If it is, they’re in.

What makes this flexible is how much control you have behind the scenes. A membership ticket can be limited by overall duration, by number of check-ins, or by how often check-ins are allowed within a certain period of time.

There are two main ways to approach this, depending on how automated you want the system to be.

Option one: Tickera as a standalone membership system

This approach works well if you want a straightforward setup without recurring payments.

As usual with Tickera, everything starts with creating an event. In this scenario, the event acts purely as a container for your memberships. Customers don’t perceive it as an “event” - it’s just how memberships work internally.

Next, you create ticket types that represent your membership plans: one month, three months, six months, yearly, or any custom duration you need.

One common way to handle validity is to set the ticket to be valid within a certain time after the first check-in. This means the membership doesn’t start counting down until the member actually shows up for the first time. A one-month membership stays valid for 30 days after the first scan, three months for 90 days, and so on.

In addition to that, you can also control how often the customer can check their ticket in. This is especially useful for gyms and fitness centres. For example, you can configure a ticket type to allow one check-in per day, a limited number of weekly visits, or a specific number of check-ins per month. Tickera enforces these rules automatically, so staff don’t need to make judgment calls at the door.

This combination of time-based validity and check-in frequency limits covers a surprising number of real-world membership models. From unlimited access to tightly controlled number of visits per month, week, day and even hour - it's all available.

Option two: recurring memberships with WooCommerce subscriptions

If you want to run Tickera as gym membership system with automatic renewals and minimal ongoing administration, this is the more advanced approach.

Here you’ll use Tickera together with WooCommerce, Bridge for WooCommerce, and WooCommerce Subscriptions.

You still begin by creating an event in Tickera. The difference is that the actual membership plans are created as subscription products inside WooCommerce. Each subscription product represents a membership plan. While creating it, you simply mark it as a ticket and assign it to the Tickera event. From that point on, the subscription controls whether the ticket is valid.

As long as the customer’s subscription is active, their ticket can be checked in. If the subscription expires or is cancelled, the ticket automatically becomes invalid. There’s no need to define end dates manually.

Check-in limits still apply here as well. Even with an active subscription, you can restrict how often a member can enter within a given period, such as once per day or a fixed number of visits per week. This makes subscriptions suitable not only for unlimited access plans but also for structured or class-based memberships.

One thing worth noting is that subscription renewals in WooCommerce don’t generate new tickets. Instead, the original order contains the ticket, and all renewals are linked to it. Members keep using the same ticket for as long as their subscription remains active.

A practical pro tip for multiple gym locations (and universal access)

If you operate more than one gym or fitness centre, running Tickera as gym membership system gives you a clean and scalable way to handle that on a single website.

The most straightforward approach is to create one event per location. Each event represents a specific gym, and ticket types under that event represent memberships for that location only. Customers can clearly choose which gym they’re signing up for, and check-ins stay neatly separated between locations.

But you can take this a step further.

If you offer access to all of your gyms under a premium plan, you can create an additional event - for example called “Universal access” - and associate a dedicated membership ticket type with it. You can sell these tickets at a higher price and effectively acts as an all-locations membership.

From the customer’s perspective, this is very intuitive: single-gym memberships cost less, universal access costs more. From your perspective, access rules remain explicit and controlled.

One thing to keep in mind with this setup is check-in configuration. Because each location uses its own event, you’ll need check-in API keys that can scan both the individual gym event and the universal access event.This ensures that staff at each location can validate local memberships as well as universal ones, without accidentally granting access to tickets that shouldn’t work there.

It’s a small extra step during setup, but it keeps the system predictable and avoids edge cases at the front desk.

You can also tweak Tickera’s language file and replace “Event” with “Gym” (and “Events” with “Gyms”) across the interface. That small wording change makes a big difference in clarity, especially once you start working with multiple locations and access levels.

Checking members in

Once the customer purchases their membership, they will receive their ticket by email with a QR code or barcode. Additionally, you can also include the QR code of the membership right in the body of the email by using a solution found here.

And once the customer arrives at the gym, the process is quite simple. They show their membership card (ticket) and the front desk staff checks it in. They can use Checkinera app on a phone, tablet, or barcode or 2D scanner connected to the computer where Checkinera web is running in the browser.

The app instantly confirms whether the ticket is valid at that moment, taking into account expiration dates, subscription status (if used), and any check-in frequency limits you’ve defined.

If you want to explore all available check-in limitation options in more detail, including time-based rules and usage limits, we recommend checking out our YouTube tutorial where these scenarios are demonstrated step by step.

Which approach makes more sense?

If you’re looking for simplicity and don’t need recurring billing, using Tickera as a standalone system is a perfectly valid choice. It’s easy to set up and easy to explain to members.

If your business relies on ongoing memberships, automatic renewals, and predictable access control, combining Tickera with WooCommerce Subscriptions is the more robust long-term solution. It reduces manual work, minimizes expired memberships slipping through, and creates a smoother experience for both staff and customers.

While WooCommerce Subscriptions is a paid add-on, many gyms find that the operational benefits quickly outweigh the cost.

Wrapping it up

With a bit of thoughtful configuration, you can use Tickera as gym membership system like it's meant to be used that way.

And that is the case for many other scenarios. Whenever you need to decide who can enter, how often, and under what conditions, Tickera gives you the tools to do it cleanly and reliably.

If you’d like more inspiration, check out our other use cases. And if you’ve come up with an interesting setup of your own, feel free to share it with us at info@tickera.com We’re always curious to see how people put Tickera to work.