I saw some figures a while ago that showed that the average PPL will do less than 50hrs post licence issue. That is appalling. One of the main reasons is that after passing the test, most PPL's are either skint or have nothing to do since the vast majority of clubs don't understand that people need a reason to go flying and to do something interesting.
Flyouts are the minimum a club should organise, once a month go somewhere fun for the weekend, instructors would love it as they would do something different and there would be a reason for people to spend all that cash.
It must be very hard to justify spending hundreds of pounds at a time for what is essentially an individual past time. There must be alot of pressure on the 'home front' for many people.
With respect to newer a/c, when we got a couple of brand new machines a couple of years ago, we started to see a strange effect. The average hours flown to get a licence started to drop. Eventually we discovered that it may have to do with people feeling more comfortable in a newer machine. They weren't as nervous and therefore had more capacity for learning. I estimate that this actually offsets the slightly additional hourly cost. This is not something you can measure, butafter sitting next to people for a couple of thousand hours, you realise small things can make a big difference.
What do people consider to be the catchment area for a school, how far would you be prepared to travel? I reckon about an hour/50 miles maximum does this sound about right?