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| History |
| How the Project Works |
| Funding |
| The Guests |
FUNDING
Now the difficult bit! The project had originally been expected to be self funding. Keith and Jane would be in the villa, with Guests, for 3 months a year, and the villa would be let to the tourist trade for the other 9 months. This is done through management agents.
The income from the tourist trade should, and did for the first year, finance the Guests, paying for their attraction tickets, their meals and, in one family’s case, the airfares. (While the Guests are asked to fund-raise as much as possible for themselves, realistically this is often impractical and unreasonable to expect.)
Unfortunately, one of the side-effects from the dreadful disaster on September the eleventh was a substantial downturn in the numbers of tourists booking Florida holidays and the villa bookings were poor. Just as they seemed to be picking up, the situation in Iraq developed and people again felt unsafe flying to Orlando. Added to that has been the SARS outbreak, and the bookings dropped to minimal levels. An understandable, but unhelpful, reaction to the dwindling number of tourists was for the theme parks, attractions and food outlets to steeply increase their prices to try to make up for the shortfall.
Regretfully. Jane and Keith made the decision to start fund raising and, with that in mind, Jane and three trustees set up Houseguests Unlimited Trust, a separate fund raising charity which, was registered as a charity in October 2003
The object of this charitable fund is to provide airfares and insurances if needed, attraction tickets, and the cost of meals, for the Guests only. It should be stressed that grants will only be made to benefit the Guests directly, and it is impossible for Jane and Keith to benefit in any way from this fund. (It has been written into the documentation that they will not receive payment, rent, salary, expenses or any other form of remuneration from the fund. They will fund their own tickets, airfares, expenses etc. themselves.)
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