Depends on your goal.
I understand it’s quite frustrating to organise a fly-in to Greece to only find 1 other person coming.
I hope you pick-up places that you want to go to anyway which certainly mitigates that frustration. 
I suppose some “beginner” type could be interested in more packaged options as this is stress relieving.
I could be that kind for my first flights to places after my IR ticket for example. Although forum “assistance” may be enough to answer my questions.
I would guess most others would know how to do theses trips and the preparation involved and consider the trip more as a “spur of the moment” thing ?
Getting a prepayment on a dinner makes sense to bind people in but most on here want to choose their own route and hotel. How can you provide routes anyway – there are so many types and departure airports it would be impossible. If pilots need help flight planning for a flyin set up a dedicated thread where the community can help.
€200 is not a lot of money in that everybody reading EuroGA will still eat tomorrow if they lost €200, but the psychological value of €200 is substantial. It is roughly the biggest banknote in current use (the €500 is not usable in much of Europe, at least not in shops).
Anyway this is digressing…
Regarding route planning assistance, given that some will be flying VFR, we have the worsening problem of a lack of usable VFR charts for many places like Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and of course Greece. So if say we had a fly-in to Croatia, getting some jpegs of PDFs together which people could print out and fly with, may well be useful. The only alternative is one of the tablet products and not everyone uses them.
How do you go about getting a half price hotel deal? Does the hotel ask for a lump sum in return? It is obvious to all that there might be a big cancellation if the wx is bad.
There will be almost no cancellations. The pilots who don’t dare to fly down there IFR come by airline (bus shuttle from Athens), and everybody else flies IFR, there’s very few who don’t. At that time of the year, you can really always make it down there.
Don’t know about the hotel etc., have to study all that when i have more time.
From my point of view (the problem is I’m really tight on remaining days of annual leave, they are nearly all booked up before the year even starts!) all I’d really like to see is a recommendation for fuel stops along the way.
This was a lot easier for fly-ins when I lived in the United States. The answer to “Which airport is a good GA fuel stop or weather diversion” was nearly “virtually all of them”. It’s not quite so easy in Europe with some airports with short opening hours, bizarre bureaucratic practises (I really don’t want to end up at an airport where they insist on “Security” to find no one has seen an FAA pilot’s license before and holds me up for hours and tries to confiscate my water bottle, or wants printed flight plans etc), or unexpected and exorbitant fees.
For instance for weather diversions in the US when I was flying something VFR-only I’d pick a regional airport, there usually was a full service FBO and although it would be expensive by US standards, I could at least park, they’d arrange a hotel and a car for me with the minimum of fuss, and I could pretty much guarantee that just by picking somewhere with class C or D airspace near a reasonable sized town. Not so easy here! (I remember rolling up at a Millionair somewhere in the southwest US after being blocked by a line of nasty thunderstorms, turning up in a very grubby Tripacer and having a red carpet rolled out to me, and being treated as if I had just arrived in a Gulfstream V!)
So really, for me, if I’m going to try to make a fly-in I don’t need any kind of briefing pack but it would be nice to have someone recount experience at some of the airfields along the way as to their suitability.
To charge some sort of downpayment will do two things: only those who are REALLY sure they will come will apply, most won’t.
We tried this once with a fly out, said we charge a nominal sum of 20 Euros or so ahead to finance some of the preparations we were prepared to do and to get that “comit” factor. We had ZERO sign ups.
On the other hand, when I organized a short fly out to Speyer a few years ago, where I booked just the hotel for everyone, we had 5 airplanes with 20 people.
In that case, what are Cirrus Germany doing to get €200 out of " almost everybody "?
That’s quite a bus trip from Athens to Kalamata, too…
Has nothing to do with Cirrus Germany. It is organized by COPA, and they do these events every year, in the USA and in Europe! They are also always a success with many pilots and their families coming.
I think there is quite a difference if a type club or any other club does they yearly reunion someplace and requires localities, speakers, conference rooms e.t.c. There it is perfectly clear that prepayment should be made. I used to go to Gettysburg every year and to some other Civil War venues, we always had to register and pre-pay the guided tours and conferences.
A fly in which we do however is different in my opinion. All an organizer can do is to look for accomodation, check the airport and write what he has found in this forum for people to do their own reservations and then see who is coming. Prepayment is only needed if the organizer has non-refundable costs.
alioth wrote:
the problem is I’m really tight on remaining days of annual leave, they are nearly all booked up before the year even starts!)
I honestly think that this is the biggest problem these days. Time. Many of us who are employed really do not have the time to do serious flying. First of all we are hammered into an unmovable schedule, are threatened with loss of job when we once would come 1 day later and need to give our off days months in advance. That leaves no flexibility at all. For me, this has been the biggest issue since I am back to flying. Of course, this is not a problem only for flying but for everything other than work.
