On Tuesday, February 24, 2015 at 4:45:06 PM UTC+13, Doug Mueller wrote:
At 01:12 23 February 2015, gotovkotzepkoi wrote:
Not without either joining their flying club or the operator has an
extensive check out entailing numerous rides. I gave up on the checkout
and just let them give rides. That is their bread and butter. Giving
rides to your family will be frowned upon when they want to make a
buck. Im just sayin.

I don't doubt your word that this particular FBO acts as described, though that seems rather churlish and counter to the principle of making happy and loyal customers by selling them what they want.

My experience of commercial glider operations in the USA is that once they've ticked the boxes to make sure their insurance company will pay out, they point me to the (rather high) list of prices for retrieves etc and tell me to do whatever I want.

Certainly that was the case at Turf Soaring when I was in Phoenix for a month once, back when I had about 100 hours. I picked the ASK21 as I'd never flown one. We did a flight with some boxing the wake, slack line recovery, thermalling, various stalls, a chandelle or two. After, the instructor (who happened to be the local FAA examiner) said I needed two more landings on type for insurance purposes, so I should do two 500 ft tows with another instructor and they'd only charge me for one of them. I then proceeded to take half a dozen people for rides over the next couple of weeks.