On 16 Mar 2007 11:28:12 -0700, "fred"
wrote:

A question often asked is "Why has the glider activity declined?"
A well known ride operator told me that 1800gliderrides expected to
sell FOUR MILLION in rides in 2007.

I live in Italy, and I base my observations on club-managed soaring
activity. Almost no commercial operations are available in my country,
and are quite rare in Europe.

I believe that promotion of our sport can't benefit from glider rides.
Glider riders are expensive, not much fun, and a typical "been there,
done that" situation.
Intruduction courses are much better at retaining new members.
Costs are not the main reason for not getting into gliding.
Fear is.
Gliding is dangerous, IMVHO, or at least perceived as dangerous.

I have spoken with quite a number of people who have quit gliding
after a few or many years. Cost is the first topic they provide, but
if you ask some questions, available time (work, family) is generally
the 2nd. The third is having achieved only small goals (or, high
expectations and lesser results; results/costs ratio); this is
definitely harder to admit for most.
Finally, two topics get into play, and I strongly believe they are
most important:
.. the quality of sociality in the club, or the bad quality of human
relations (quarrelling between groups of members, disagreements, poor
management of the club, sometimes even intrusions in very private
aspects of family life...)
.. safety of the sport. In the 15 years of my gliding career, my
phonebook spots a black line in almost every page.

Sociality can be very hard to manage, bust must be addressed by the
club's management. When fights and quarrelling are going on, and the
members feel they have to "choose which side they should stand", or
they struggle to keep themselves out of the fight, my experience is
that the club will loose about 10percent of its members. And most of
the rest are quite unhappy.
I expect that commercial operations might be less prone to this
problem. If the operator is customer-oriented, of course.

Safety, and the achievement of reasonable goals, can in part be
addressed by a group of volunteers devoted to personalized, advanced
cross-country techiniques. But, it takes some very special kind of
people, to stay in gliding for a long time at high level of
commitment, like most of us do. We can't expect everyone to be like
us.

I believe any promotion/retention strategy can't be complete if it
doesn't aim at these two topics also.

Aldo Cernezzi