>That's all certainly possible and doable, but why?
Because their customers have requested it, and Adventure Pilot/iFly has (presumably) decided it's a worthwhile feature.
>They would have to add resources (people) to administer such a system.
Virtually everything they do could cause them to have to add resources (people) to administer such a system. It's up to iFly/Adventure Pilot to determine if it's a worthwhile investment. However, it would seem this particular system could be completely resource (people) free (other than the initial and follow up debugging programming, and, of course, the iFly customers that input the fuel price data.
>It's more effective and efficient to purchase the data from someone who is already gathering it.
How do you know this? The company selling the data, has to pay to gather the data, verify it, and pay for their overhead as well as whatever profit they think they want. I can't imagine they are going to operate on a minimum profit, when they can operate on a moderate or maximum profit. I would imagine that Adventure Pilot will take their costs into account if and when they decide to provide, or not, this feature.
>Why would Adventure Pilot be better at this than any other service provider who is already doing it?
As I understand it, Adventure Pilot is already getting the basic information from such a provider. What's been suggested is a way for iFly users to have an easy way to input corrections to the prices when they don't match the information provided by the vendor.
>Should AP start generating they own charts?
As I understand it, AP does generat their own charts in a manner of speaking. While they get the basic informaion (Free?) from the government, they still have to do some modifying/clarifying/trimming/whatever to those maps to get them to work with the iFly. After all, our charts look the same as those on Skyvector, an iPad, or on any of a number of other offerings out there. Yet none of the map data of any of those is usable on any of the others. On the other hand, if you meant generate them completely from scratch, then your question is a bit hyperbolic. No one is suggesting that iFly contact every FBO in the country and cause them to deliver current price data to them, nor is anyone suggesting that AP start a nationawide FBO chain to ensure they have "Guaranteed" prices. All that's been asked for is a way to update/correct the price information that the iFly already has displayed on our devices.
Actually, now that I re-read the OP, the suggestion was that iFly owners update the information, then AP send that information to GlobalAir (the vendor providing the price information). If this were to be worked out, I would think that AP should be able to negotiate a lower price for the information, given that we users are providing more current/correct information than GlobalAir is able. So, this feature may even LOWER the costs of providing fuel price data to iFly users.