I recently heard that a resident offered a family of four facilitation and a tour for $50. And the family turned that down saying "We will gladly do work trade instead of the $50." and that didn't get worked out.
I am relieved. I feel a little less crazy now. It seems weird to say that we gotta have $100 per person no matter what, and then something like the museum of flight charged $15 per person.
On the other hand, the tour guides at the museum of flight get paid zero. And the museum of flight gets millions of dollars in donations and other gifted stuff. And they have a stream of maybe a thousand people a day.
And for all of our visitors, we have averaged paying $100 per visitor in cleaning stuff. And that's what we paid AFTER people cleaned up after themselves. I suppose that if we had more traffic, we might be able to optimize this to just $15 per person.
We do, sometimes, do something where we will have a work party set up and people can come out en masse and do stuff - and the
gapper fee is waived. But it is usually pretty short notice.
I guess I am writing this because there is such a disconnect. $100 does seem high. And when we run all the numbers, $100 works out to be low.
Maybe we need a different pricing structure. After all, a lot of the cleaning costs was for people that were here a long time.
Maybe there can be an organized tour where ten people can be picked up in missoula, brought out, given the big tour and then taken back. People could pay, say, $40. And if could be figured out to be a five person minimum. If there are not five people, then the event doesn't happen and those people will be signed up for the next outing.
A really good tour is two hours at basecamp and two hours at the lab. Four hours. If a person is earning $15 per hour, that's $60. And that doesn't count vehicle use, coordinating stuff over the interne, cleaning up after people or getting them to and from missoula. That's just the tour.
Sometimes it is just one person and sometimes it is 30 people.
If a person is going to be here a while, they need to find out where to put their tent. Sometimes they don't have a tent and something needs to be figured out.
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Even more importantly: can a resident come up with a collection of tour programs and gapper/wwoofer facilitation without me having to be involved?
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People have come to say that they will do oodles of work - thus mitigating any costs that might be incurred by their being here. This is the
root of the whole
wwoofer program. But the problem with that is that EVERYBODY is sure that their contribution will be greater than the cost of keeping them, but the result is more often the opposite. I think that for certain organizers, that system can work out wonderfully. We have not yet perfected this system.
I wonder if we
should do something where it is $100 per month for each person here. The idea being that $100 covers rides to/from the airport, the tour, getting them settled, talking to them on the phone or via email before hand and then cleaning up after them when they leave. And the $100 per month covers the cleaning and stuff while they are here, plus the additional cleanup after they leave.
A flip side to this is that we could pay bigger bounties to people that do the cleaning.
And, people that earn oodles of bounties won't have a problem with the $100 per month. People could slap down $100 to get here and then earn bounties to keep them going.
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Just some thoughts to try to get things working well again.