Pay and Play

Ive only paid to play a few times times and that was a couple of decades ago , a couple of times at Rutland and once at Grafham and certainly at Rutland it was though a commercial operation not the sailing club . 

I've seen many of the former, very few of the latter. As others have noted, for a typical club it's just not worth the small amount of money.

My club looked at how we could leverage the resources we had (water, clubhouse, changing rooms, boats etc) to widen access through greater/easier use of club boats etc.  We concluded that the additional income we might have generated would more than likely not offset the additional costs we would incur, even if we disregarded the biggest issue we had which was finding additional volunteer labour to staff the scheme. Some of those in favour of this approach thought we'd get additional membership as a result, but the majority didn't agree hence we didn't go ahead. Good luck to those clubs that think pay to play is for them, but personally I think its not a good business model for most clubs hence the lack of take up. 

Originally posted by fab100 if casual, non-member pay and play like this was viable, someone would already be doing it successfully.

People are doing it 'successfully' but it's a small market. There's a much bigger market for hiring out SUPs at £20 per hour than dinghies at £30 an hour. The return on a £300 SUP is going to be a lot better than on a £3000 dinghy.