I've stayed in that one - nice.
Just phoned them; they have plenty of rooms for the two dates. They will accept a cancellation if done 2-3 days in advance, which I think is reasonable because the MSLP charts are good enough for that sort of decision. I told them the 25th is the backup plan.
I forgot to mention the Hotel Saint Nicolas in La Rochelle....
Or we can decide on some place to meet up.
Anyway, finding pilots is easy.
Question: you are at a party of 100 people, and one of them is a pilot. How do you find him?
Answer: You don't have to. HE finds YOU.
An old joke, but sadly quite true 
And if he is British, he will still be wearing the yellow jacket
But seriously, currently we have no idea how many plan to arrive. The number of people posting on the forum is (as always) a small fraction of how many read it.
I am going to think about how we can do some kind of "registration".
I would also suggest a final list, after checking weather, that week, with mobile numbers, of those that are still going.
Means if only two turn up, they can at least meet up.
The scenario of the only two to have made it, sitting in a bar at either ends, not knowing each other and departing thinking, shit............A long way to have a drink by myself.
If I come flying (which still seems little likely) I cannot arrive before 4pm or so. Especially if an early arrival is important, I might well come driving, which makes hotels a non-issue.
But actually, I should think the invitation applies to flying pilots and their passengers only? That would only seem normal.
What preferences do people have on the location of the hotel?
There are some nice ones on St. Martin on the Ile de Ré, but the taxi cost may be significant.
My suggestion would be to fly in on the Saturday morning, as early as possible. Then we can have Sat pm and Sun am to "do stuff".
La Rochelle is nice (I picked up a 74ft catamaran from there which was sailed to the Red Sea). It just has the same problem as many great destinations for me: there is a high speed train connection bringing me there for a fraction of the money, completely relaxed and much safer.
I still haven't given up looking for that one time where my airplane actually allowed me to do a trip that would have been very difficult otherwise.
And even though it's a democratic vote, it's a bit awkward. The two largest nations here are the UK (by a large margin I guess) and Germany. It's not the typical Le Touquet hop but a bit further and in a direction that also means further away for Germans and almost everybody else, too. A typical Euro-compromise thus
I've heard good things about these two hotels, but haven't stayed there myself:
If I look on booking.com it seems that many hotels in the old centre of La Rochelle are filling up. I have made a booking in one of them which I can easily still cancel and count me in for the first weekend option only.
