Well your are well wrong there, i never paid 200 quid to be choosen to buy a service that I WANTED off any flying school. And if you bother to note I am actually flying the line. You are quite correct you are paying for a service, you are paying for all those marketing mincers to sell you the product.
When they tell you its 200 quid for the assement day just ask them I am paying cash are you wanting my 60k or what? See what the reply is.
I have never been refused training off oxford. I did modular ground school with them 4 years ago now. And was very pleased with what I payed for. In fact Mr C from the modular ground school is level first with all the ground school training I have done so far in my flying career.
The sample physics and maths paper are in my opinion are so basic a second year school student could do them. In fact the physics has 2 glaring mistakes in it which the questions are vague in the nicest sense and down right ill worded and wrong in the worst. If you fail the assement you should really consider if you should be driving a car never mind flying a plane.
now the brake down of the profit on a assesment day.
1. Staff, all on a fixed salary they would be at work anyway its all part of the job. At anyone time you will be exposed to maximum 3 people for max 1 hour each because in the great marketing book they say that if you use more than that it puts off the punter. They would get payed if the day went ahead or not. You will be there for 6 hours so 18 * 3 * 20 quid an hour is about a grand which would have been payed anyway. So anything more than 5 punters and everything is payed for even if it wasn't anyway, which it is.
2. Sim time, its a 13amp fuse, the sim is maintained on a yearly contract and gets done however many hours it does. the bloke that runs it is on point one.
3. Rooms, they have to pay for them if its full or not.
4. The ****e food that the canteen puts out which must cost maximum 1.50 per person on the day.
So I reckon increase in profit for the day is £190 per person.
Go and walk into a modular school and ask them about there courses see if they ask you for 200 quid before they will talk to you.
The most likely thing you will hear is
school " when were you thinking of starting your CPL?"
student" well next week please"
school" sorry m8 you have no chance, we have 12 students booked in for CPL and IR in the next 3 months. Next slot is early Nov but if a few of them slip it could be Dec."
student " but I need to get it done quickly"
School " sorry but we have done that before and it's really not worth the hassel, it piss's our instructors off and our current student's off and we are not willing to drop our training standards to accomadate it"
And that was a conversation I heard at my IR school by the ops monkey, maybe not word for word but the gist is there.
Do you notice the lack of well it's 200 quid to sit in a sim for 30mins and have some crap food? No its this is what we can provide when we can provide it and no we arn't going to comprise just for the sale.
And for the chap from france. Flight to Heathrow then bus up to oxford then either local bus or taxi to the airfield. Allow at least 4 hours for the trip. taxi was 4 years ago about 30 pounds on a sunday.