(Thx ;-) but i checked and it only shows “Vodafone GR” …. must be from some islands not too far away!)
Aviathor wrote:
the prices you refer to are very low. Either they have extremely low costs (maintenance and hangarage), or they fly a lot (but then availability would suffer) or they do not cover the real costs (including capital cost)
From what I gather, the costs are kept low by a few measures/factors:
I haven’t had any issues with availability during the two years of membership, even for multi day trips or last minute trips. Of course, if you’re trying to get a plane on a Saturday afternoon in summer after 4 weeks of rain, it might get difficult…
172driver wrote:
is there an annual club fee? Otherwise these prices are amazingly low, even by US standards. How much is the tax?
Yes – there is an annual base fee of 200 EUR and on top of that an optional “annual base charter fee” of 300 EUR in order to be eligible to these rates. If you opt to not pay the base charter fee, the hourly rates are 30 EUR more. The tax is 7% for non-commercial flights.
Patrick wrote:
Yes – there is an annual base fee of 200 EUR and on top of that an optional “annual base charter fee” of 300 EUR in order to be eligible to these rates. If you opt to not pay the base charter fee, the hourly rates are 30 EUR more. The tax is 7% for non-commercial flights.
Wow, that’s an amazingly good deal!
172driver wrote:
Wow, that’s an amazingly good deal!
Fly310 wrote:
What surprises me is that you pay tax on renting from an aero club, in Sweden we do not tax that kind of acitivity within a non-profit organisation.
Well, in a sense we pay taxes in Sweden too, since the club itself has to pay tax on everything it buys — including maintenance.
@Patrick, is your club VAT registered?
Mathematically speaking 
a nonprofit organisation should be able to operate a number of planes for the same cost to the members as a sole owner who flies the same hours. Everything has to be paid for, somehow, but there is no reason to pay more. Doing in-house maintenance is done by every smart+big school anyway – why pay towards the profit of another company? Same for the coffee shop: run it yourself and pocket the profit from that too.
The usual difficulty is utilisation. You need that to be good. Hence the mentioned regular payments – they make people think twice about not using the facility because they don’t feel like it. An SR22 setup around here was changing £2500/year, IIRC, and that really keeps the members turning up.
You also need relatively wealthy members who don’t moan about everything and just pay
And a wealthy area from which to draw the members. In the UK, the London clubs get closest to that, but none of them have IFR airfields. Biggin Hill is a bit too far away.
Airborne_Again wrote:
is your club VAT registered?
Yes – it is. I wouldn’t have known how to pay for fuel in Spain without that tax identification number, anyway. 
Does a nonprofit entity have a mandatory VAT reg once over a certain output figure (c. 85k in the UK)? I think it must have. Maybe “charitable” bodies (which flying clubs are in some countries) are different.
Whether it increases costs to the members is a good Q because the club can reclaim input VAT on fuel and everything else. The negative there would be that it cannot reclaim VAT on direct labour, obviously.
You can pay in Spain without a VAT number but the man at the pump may not know that. I had a hilarious exchange with the ELP=0.000 fuel man at Pamplona last year…
Does a nonprofit entity have a mandatory VAT reg once over a certain output figure (c. 85k in the UK)? I think it must have. Maybe “charitable” bodies (which flying clubs are in some countries) are different.
In Germany yes, if the previous year income was more than 17500€ or will be more than 50000€ for the current year. (German guide for club taxes.) For the income different VAT schemes apply: 0% (no VAT)/7% (reduced VAT)/19% (full VAT), depending on how the income is generated. For a german flying club the term that applies is “gemeinnützig”, like beneficial for the public when it comes to tax law.
Whether it increases costs to the members is a good Q because the club can reclaim input VAT on fuel and everything else. The negative there would be that it cannot reclaim VAT on direct labour, obviously.
Actually it decreases cost, because as you correctly state, one can reclaim VAT (e.g. 19% on fuel) and charter is charged with 7% VAT only. In regards of direct labour I don’t get your point, do you mean if members are working for the club without getting paid? Well that is true, but how does one handle value for unpaid service? German tax law has another goodie: If you are working as a trainer (or in our case e.g. flight instructor) for a club which is “gemeinnnützig”, you can earn up to 2400€/year without paying income taxes ("Wikipedia article about "Übungsleiterpauschale"":https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Übungsleiterpauschale) for this money. So some more money to spent on flying!
