What do you consider a fair price for a skirmish

[Tommikka]

Oops my bad, I was thinking of a different recreational toy gun based hobby ?

I recognised the price structure ….. but to be fair that is a rental price structure intended for the occasional day out,

as opposed to an own gunner who would ideally be paying a slightly higher green fee and buying their balls by the case load.  
 

Such as £25 entry and options of BYO or a case of 2000 for £30 of good fresh balls - (approx £55 for a day out) as opposed to basic rentals with free or cheap entry plus a rolling price structure against various quantities of basic quantity balls. (If planned ahead probably £50/£60 for a day out with half as many balls but slower shooting or around £100+ without researching the price structure or going in with fat wallets)

Each type of player would expect to be separated to different dates or different areas of the site - and expect staff to be paid rather than volunteers / player Marshall’s 

In airsoft the situation may vary between sites but it appears that the trend is for regulars to be mixed among rentals unless it’s a large group / exclusive booking, and as noted in the thread isn’t very viable in contrast to the overheads of running a site

In paintball the sites exist due to the primary business of public rental paintball and then add walkons with other pricing for encouraging repeat custom from own gunners as they get more serious 

I equate airsoft to a cross between walkon & scenario paintball, and to be viable sites need a good turnover of players to cover the costs of the site,

staff etc 

 

[Rogerborg]

we instead have club's with a yearly subscription fee to cover insurance and get some money to buy/build/rent stuff (varies from club to club, in mine it's €70 for example), you get a permit to play on a piece of land and essentially you're done

It's an interesting model, but I can't see it working in the UK.  We're a cramped, crowded island with few areas of secure, isolated land that aren't in regular use, or subject to having public randos rambling onto them.  Sites here sadly tend to get kicked off the land as soon as the landowner finds any other way of making money from it.

Even if you could find a bit of land that's unused on a given weekend, landowners might not want to have it covered in plastic, or take on any vicarious liability.

Indemnity for players might be do-able, Shooters Rights or similar could cover it.  I say "could" because their underwriter will be set up to cover people shooting at things or beasties, rather than at other people who are shooting back.  Still, it'll be fine on paper until it's not.

 

[Tactical Pith Helmet]

To be honest, I think a days entertainment for £25-£30 is amazingly cheap. I don't think there are many activities that are more than sitting on your arse in your own home(Netflix and gaming) that has such a low per hour cost. The rest of the costs (guns, ammo, food, pyro, kit) are up to the player and can be done incredibly cheaply or incredibly expensively, so looking for ways to reduce this further is feasible in the UK.

The S&T SMLE isn't cheap, but 100 budget .303 cartridges are £77 through a real one.  

A round of clays is 35p per clay and £6 a box of 25 budget cartridges. 

Shooting is never really cheap.  You are literally buying things to fling them all over the countryside.  

Airsoft is not bad value IMHO.  

To be candid... I worked out in an idle moment just how much beer I bought when I was seriously into snooker.  Two nights practicing and one nights competition was a minimum of 12 pints per week, plus table hire, taxis, nerve soothing fags, post-pub pizzas and the odd victory party to 2am.  

Life in the UK is rarely cheap, especially leisure.   Glad to be able to knacker myself out for so little tbh.   

 

[DrAlexanderTobacco]

To be fair, guys, you could adopt the model we use over here:

We don't have sites you can play at, we instead have club's with a yearly subscription fee to cover insurance and get some money to buy/build/rent stuff (varies from club to club, in mine it's €70 for example), you get a permit to play on a piece of land and essentially you're done.

Of course you won't have the numbers you're used to, you will lose some facilities like toilets and food, but overall it'll be much, much easier to sustain than dishing out a decent dinner every time you want to go out and shoot your mates in the ass from a bush.

You always make it sound really shit though. I don't mean that in a disparaging way but you have so many tales about having to corral people to even play a game, to ban certain people from clubs, and so on.

It's probably due to survivorship bias because the games/times where it works really well, you probably don't have a reason to talk about here!

 

[BigStew]

You always make it sound really shit though. I don't mean that in a disparaging way but you have so many tales about having to corral people to even play a game, to ban certain people from clubs, and so on.

It's probably due to survivorship bias because the games/times where it works really well, you probably don't have a reason to talk about here!

different mentalities. As I said clubs are a legal ball ache over here. You have to the register club as business or charity then you have to have several positions that are elected such as president, Club secretary, treasurer and there has to be regular elections. The owner/operator model works relatively well over here. the site lives or dies on the owners ability to manage. I have seen a couple of sites ruined by Teams that had enough members to make serious dents in income of sites manipulate that fact to get the site to bend to play the way they want ignore game rules/ hit taking and basically ruin it for anyone not on the team. In  a club system I could see a team with big enough numbers could take over a club a ruin it.       

 

[Groot]

I remember when it was £10 walk on and £8 for a bag of 4000bbs

It seems to have trickled up £5 every few years and now the average I see is £30 without lunch. 

I think £25 with lunch is about the fair point personally. 

 

 

[C-Diddy]

I think we all accept that airsoft is an expensive hobby, but then again, most hobbies that people commit to are. I have friends that are into various hobbies; fishing, golf, cycling etc and all spend an equal if not greater amount on their chosen activity than I do on airsoft.

To answer the original question, site fees in the £25-30 I think are fairly typical and fair. With various family and work commitments I rarely get the chance to go more than once a month though. Lunch is a nice to have (sometimes!) but not essential, and I tend to buy my consumables in bulk from other retailers rather than the site shops. 

My regular site, Ground Zero, is huge at approximately 150 acres. Renting that much land in the south of England is not going to be cheap. They recently increased their prices by £2 to £27 for members and £32 for non-members. I still don't think that's too bad, and fully accept that sites, like many other businesses, need to try and recoup the losses caused by Covid. 

 

[Jaylordofwaargh]

. Hell I payed close to £100 to see muse last time they toured (was it good valve no! was it a fantastic gig yes would i do it again? yes)

This is good value even as you state it, willing to pay, again, for an experience that was a fair wack of cash! 

@Groot I recognise that cs price structure, still too soon, but I have heard rumours....

As to what I pay, well I accept that £25/£30 is fair for a days running around. 

I think it would have to hit £40 walk-on for me to begin questioning those fees - but then I get to go only every quarter or so

 

[Skara]

You always make it sound really shit though. I don't mean that in a disparaging way but you have so many tales about having to corral people to even play a game, to ban certain people from clubs, and so on.

It's probably due to survivorship bias because the games/times where it works really well, you probably don't have a reason to talk about here!

Yup, I mostly post two things in my thread:

Really good/fun games, or shit days where everything goes wrong.

The "Joe average" days where nothing particularly fun/good/bad/whatever happens I usually don't write about.

Also I am pretty sure you guys have these issues as well, but since it's the site owner's responsibility to kick idiots out and not yours (as paying customers), you probably don't even notice it, I think it's also due to the large numbers of people you have on site.

We're a small community so everything feels amplified, I'm pretty confident that if I had, say, 100 people in my club I wouldn't post that much about kicking cunts off because it would be "normal administration" 

 

[Skara]

It's an interesting model, but I can't see it working in the UK.  We're a cramped, crowded island with few areas of secure, isolated land that aren't in regular use, or subject to having public randos rambling onto them.  Sites here sadly tend to get kicked off the land as soon as the landowner finds any other way of making money from it.

Even if you could find a bit of land that's unused on a given weekend, landowners might not want to have it covered in plastic, or take on any vicarious liability.

Yeah that is a major issue, we got lucky because the landowner is super nice and never, ever asked us a penny in the 10 odd years we've been playing on his property.

 

[THE CHIEF]

I don't count ammo cost really, always cheaper to buy away from the site. Especially if you run a machine gun! 

I like Awa herts. The walk on has gone up to £30, but with that we have also seen site development. Plus you can't play all the areas in one day so there's a bit of variety. Another place is £25 but you know you will bee playing up and down or across the site. I'd rather spend the extra fiver. 

You can get a burger at lunch if you want or bring food. But as far a walk on fee goes I'm good with that all day long. 

 

[Cannonfodder]

My usual site is £25 or & 20 for site members, which is a fair price imo. For woodland sites I'd probably go as far as £30, but it would have to have decent facilities or something special to justify the extra cost. For urban sites I'd be happy to pay a bit more as running costs are generally higher. 

I also take travel costs into account as I don't drive and public transport gets expensive, for example the couple of times I played at Echilon in Gravesend it cost me more to get there on the train than the green fees

 

[Oneshotscott]

 £18 walk on at adrenalin, £10 for members with No food (option to purchase after safety briefing). I think this is great value for a site of its size and the construction work.  

I looked on playairsoft yesterday to see what sites are in the south Yorkshire area (visiting) and the majority are asking for £30 walk on. 

I would be happy to pay between £1-30 for a std skirmish. 

 

[The Waco Kid]

My nearest site is £25 as a walk on. No food though.

You can get a half day for £15 (but these are usually bought up) which is usually two games, initial long game woodland hike plus variable second one depending on how much dragging of feet there was at the beginning….

I actually think the sport is relatively cheap to get into. You can have a skirmishable AEG, couple of hicaps, a spare battery and eye-pro for £200-300. You don’t actually NEED any of the other tat to have fun or be effective.