Fair enough, and it's your site, but here's what I see as both an end-user and a subscriber:
Mike,
It's great to have you in this discussion, because you are both a pilot end-user and an FBO subscriber. You already have two perspectives, and I can add the AirNav perspective.
You are absolutely right, it's a manpower issue. Let me explain...
Initially we were naively doing as you suggested: let the community add and remove businesses, don't charge anything for listings, and it would all work out because the community would self-maintain the data and we would be just a hosting platform.
Well, we were proven wrong.
Few businesses ever got deleted or marked "out of business" by the community. As a result, after a few years we had a database full of non-existent businesses, as appears to be the case now with Benbow Aviation (which we do not list, btw) and many of those other business you mention at TOA. Pilots were complaining that they would visit an airport expecting to find a certain service, then not find it and be extremely disappointed at us (that's putting it mildly; some pilots were going well beyond disappointed.)
On the other side, frivolous businesses were getting listed. Our rule was that we would list any business that provided a service to GA at the airport. Not only businesses based at the airport, but all businesses serving GA at the airport because we wanted the ability to include restaurants across the street, or the local independent flight instructor who does not really have an office at the airport but can instruct there anyway, or anyone else that provided a service to GA. Then we started getting inundated with what we now call frivolous listings. There was this locksmith in Denver who argued that he deserved to be listed because "pilots might lose the keys to their airplane while they visit Denver and we would be useful to them then". There was this guy in Michigan with a van and some car-washing equipment who claimed he could wash airplanes too, and was willing to drive 300 miles to do it, therefore he deserved to be listed on every airport within 300 miles. You get the point. Because listings were free, everyone had this sense of entitlement that they deserved one (or 300). We were allowing many listings, and some airport pages were already cluttered with 50+ listings, a lot of them no longer valid or frivolous.
Most of those listings had zero comments, which to us indicated that they were irrelevant to the community.
In a nutshell, with our limited manpower we were not able to keep up and maintain a useful and correct data set, and the community was not helping maintain it, not caring about a lot of the businesses (as evidenced by the lack of comments on many of them) and was even complaining about the inaccuracies.
So we took a long hard look at the usefulness of the site, and decided to focus our limited resources on what pilots cared about the most: FBOs and restaurants and fuel prices. An FBO is something you use every time you go flying. A restaurant is something you plan to fly to. On the other hand, a maintenance shop or a flight school is something you mostly use at your own home field (and you are more familiar with those than we can possibly be, you don't need AirNav for that) and only very occasionally when away from home. Often when you need a maintenance shop away from home it would have been totally unplanned, and there would be no point in having them listed on AirNav because you were not planning on that alternator failure anyway. So we made the tough decision to focus on what we believed was more important to pilots, and regrettably had to do away with the free service to most others.
As a result, on some godawful night in 2004 we started removing listings that were not an FBO or restaurant and had not received any comment in the past 12 months. We just had no time to check up on all of them. We started focusing on the FBOs and restaurants, calling them to validate the info, making sure they existed, getting updated prices, etc. But then it became clear that restaurants were too difficult: they change way too often. It must be a tough industry to be in. So we further focused on FBOs only. Others were welcome to be listed too, limited by the amount of time we can devote to the free listings.
We also introduced paid listings. Paid listings were a great thing, because that single annual exchange (we send an invoice, you send a check) validated that the business still existed and that it cared to serve GA. We were charging as little as $12 per year, figuring that if you can't spend $1 per month you're not really seriously in business serving the GA community that frequents AirNav.com. We also created several levels of paid listings to accommodate different business needs, some significantly more expensive.
This move seems to have worked. We now have by far the best and most current FBO database out there. Site usage and participation is up consistently. We have more pilots writing comments, and we have more FBOs embracing the concept and participating. The $12 listing has gone the way of the dodo, but we still have the $15 listing that FredEd can subscribe to. The income from the businesses that choose to subscribe is used to keep the lights on, keep the servers running, pay the rent and pay the staff. We are proud that this service to and by the aviation community now supports the livelihood of 5 (soon to be 6) families. We have employees who maintain the site, answer your emails, work in a safe and pleasant environment (you should see our office!) and take home a dignified salary and full health benefits. One of our esteemed employees, a grandma, is now thinking about starting flying lessons. How cool is that?
With this historical context out of the way, let me address your specific concerns.
Sticking with my KTOA example, the airnav page lists two sections:
Fuel provider
(2 listed)
Businesses, services, and facilities
(1 listed)
now TOA is not a "sparsely populated" airport, and I am certain there are more than 3 businesses there. I made the assumption that only paying businesses get listed, and you seem to be implying this is not true. Okay. So where does the line get drawn? Which businesses are listed free of charge, and which require payment? Are there certain types of businesses which are allowed, and others which are not?
You made the wrong assumption. Look at
KTOA's listings on AirNav. Great American and Southwest pay us, South Bay does not. You can tell the difference because the paying ones are clickable (or have logos) and the free ones are not clickable. Yet South Bay gets listed too, albeit a little bit poorer listing but still with the essentials for pilots: name, phone number, fuel prices and comments.
We try to list every FBO -- although I am sure someone here is going to point out some FBO somewhere that is missing. That's why I say "try". To come clean, at TOA itself we were notified on 9/15/09 that there is now a third FBO. We are in the process of contacting them and getting all the right information to list them too (free or pay). This takes time, it's not instantaneous, so please bear with us. TOA is not the only airport in the country.
Which businesses are listed free of charge and which require payment? Any business can be listed free. We do those on a workload-permitting basis, and we focus on FBOs. Reality is, we are busy enough with paying customers and with non-paying FBOs that we always have a backlog of those to do. Yet some non-FBOs get listed free too. For example, the pilot facility at
First Flight Airport is well loved by pilots and is listed free, and gets respect from the community and a fair number of useful comments. So it gets listed free. As of today, we have 624 free listings of non-FBOs, and 1572 free listings of FBOs. We check on all of these at least once a year, sometimes more. It is a cost that we bear in support of the community. Those 624+1572 don't pay us a dime.
Now reality is that we have commitments to our customers, and commitments come first. Mike, you contract with us for a service, and we have service commitments. We promise to update your listing in xx hours, to update your fuel prices in xx minutes, whatever. Those come first, because they are contractual commitments. We are staffed to do all of our contracted commitments and then some. With the extra time we support comments (that no one pays for), we format and place airport photos (that no one pays for), we support a fair amount of free listings (that no one pays for), etc. Can we promise that we will have all free listings on the site at all times? No. Can we promise that we will add a certain free listing by any specific time? No. Sorry, all those are done in the cracks, time-permitting.
As a business, can you request a free listing? Yes. Can you expect a free listing by tomorrow? No. You go in the queue, and we get to you when we get to you. The free listings are provided as a service to the aviation community, not a service to the business desiring it. We have an internal queue for handling these, and we do get to all, eventually.
Are there certain types of businesses which are allowed, and others which are not? All legal businesses that provide a service to GA are allowed. Paid service gets done within our time commitments, free service on a workload-permitting basis. We take a broad view of what is a service to GA, to the point of allowing restaurants, taxi service, etc. Businesses that are not of interest to GA users are not allowed, paid or free, because they would unnecessarily clutter up the pages. These requests are rare. But just yesterday I saw a request by a realtor who sold homes in the city (not on the airpark, mind you) wanting to list, because "a pilot who flies to our airport may be relocating and needing to buy a home here." This is such a stretch that we did not allow the listing, paid or free.
Also, why does AirNav "know about" the following businesses at KTOA, but does not list them?
We at one time "knew about" these business. Because we do not have the time to check on them, we no longer "know about" them. So we choose not to list them because we believe many are defunct. Torrance Flite Park, LLC is the supposed new FBO, which we are trying to get listed asap. The others are just non-FBOs that we have not had time to check up on. Several appear to be out of business.
If it is just a matter of insufficient manpower to keep listings updated, I'm certain you could just allow us users a way to keep things accurate. Lord knows the users are ravenous with fuel pricing updates, I suspect they'd vote off a defunct business pretty swiftly too.
The problem is, I suspect it is not just a matter of insufficient manpower, but rather, that these places will not be listed without ponying up. I'm not saying that is wrong, but it definitely appears that way to me on the sidelines. So what's the real scoop?
I don't know what the Lord knows, I have no good connections up there. I know that I know that users only contribute less than 10% of the price updates. Most price updates come from FBOs and from our own calls to FBOs. I also know what happened when we let the users self-report: we got a database full of unreported defunct entries and lots of frivolous entries.
So the real scoop is as I said above: we can't list all for free. We list over 2000 for free. We are not the aviation yellow pages, so you can't except to find everyone here. But we are the absolute best at FBOs, and we devote a significant amount of time at validating and maintaining thousands of free content items (listings, comments, photos, airport diagrams, etc.)
When I use AirNav, I actually will click on the "add your business here" link, just to get a full and complete picture of what is available at a certain airport. That's a broken way of doing things.
Yes it is broken. The "Add your business" link is not meant for that. We do not list those businesses precisely because we have no confidence in the data. When you click on that link you get a very twisted version of what may have once existed at that airport. Bad bad bad, don't do it.
I pay you guys some $800 or so per year just to get my businesses listed at my own field, ...
Mike, check your accounting, You do not pay us anywhere close to $800. It's much less. I am not going to discuss your account here publicly, but if you have any questions please call or email our customer service and they'll be able to go over your account with you. (check your PM for details) Also, it's not "just to get your business listed". You do not have just a Basic listing. You chose to have a higher level listing with features such as logos, etc. You could have a much cheaper listing, or you can drop out of the paid listings and we would do our best to keep you in the freebies.