Experience Day Website
Hi Guys,
I've been around these forums for awhile now looking for a way to fund a PPL & the cost of flying after. I am employed but my salary isn't enough to support flying as a hobby.
I was thinking about setting up an experience day website where I could list experiences like 30 mins trial flight, stunt experience flight, helicopter experience flight etc, similar to Virgin Experience days and Red Letter Days, but my focus would be on aircraft and fast cars.
I know the big boys are dominating the market but that is the same with all markets. I reckon I could target my area of the UK first, before providing experiences nationwide.
So I will need to contact the local flying schools to see if they would be willing to strike a deal. Why should they? Because for them I can put customers into their aircraft and they can then flog them food in the cafe or even better get them interested in flying lessons.
I would sell the experience on my website for a price of, lets say, £59 for a 30 minute flight. I would then take a %age cut and the rest would go to the airfield to provide the experience.
Once purchased, the customer would book their experience date with the airfield and I would pay the airfield the required money.
So why am I here? I need to find out what kind of figures I need to look at. Obviously I don't want to be suggesting %ages of 5% and being accepted when I could in fact get 20%. I also don't want to be suggesting 35% and being laughed out of the door. I'm looking for a percentage that still allows the airfield to make some profit, but also allows me to take a profit.
Is anyone here closely involved in the running of an airfield and could possibly give me a rough idea of the cost of providing an experience flight? I don't mind which aircraft you talk about, just so long as you let me know. I know the price of instruction in a cessna hovers around £150ph but I don't know how much of this is profit and how much is cost.
Any help is greatly appreciated.