@parto @youngun Had my first flight the weekend before last at the gold coast venue. Was really impressed with the whole experience - booking was easy, checkin was good (digital, captures email / data etc for future marketing), staff were super friendly 'dudes', clean crisp and modern building / facility, a few good little in-house up-sells. The flying was fun, and took a mate for his first time who has since rebooked flight time. The only think i think they could have improved on was that there was no cafe and at any point while i was there, there were 20-40 spectators sitting twiddling their thumbs. You could buy coffee and drinks but they just had tiny menu's on tables and no visible cafe (all made in a kitchen out back). There used to be a 3rd party contractor selling coffee etc, apparently the contractor only lasted a week or two and bailed cos they claimed they weren't making any money. I dont understand why the Cafe isn't run in-house with one staff member (there were 3 staff at check-in desks which was a bit excessive as you basically signed yourself in on a touch screen - one of them could be better utilised running the cafe).
I went on a Sunday morning in peak school holidays. They were mostly booked out for the day. There were 8 visible staff for the venue. Everything ran on time and everyone who flew loved it. I questioned one of the staff about what they were like monday to friday out of school holidays - he said the were quiet as between 9.00am to 1.00pm but then picked up and were super busy weekday evenings with heaps of the local Indian / Pakistani and Arab community returning regularly. If that rings true year round then the gold coast site should perform pretty well this year.
Im still humming and harring about grabbing some shares - I would like to see another one or two venues announced and see some decent revenue growth for FY18. Picking venues must be hard for this crew as it would be too expensive to retro fit a wind tunnel into a mall / building by the looks of it - more for extensions / new builds which would limit growth potential somewhat...
