Yes, the day of, or day before we were ready to make our trip on Giamani, their generator broke down. They still had a back-up generator, but were being responsible by not taking their boat out for our trip. The dive group of unassociated passengers including us, were locked into our departure date at the end of our planned trip, so options for another boat were extremely limited. Giamani offered to just refund us our money at that time. Our group collectively almost begged them to find an alternative boat b/c we had traveled so far. They jumped through hoops to get us on an alternative boat, with the departure date a day later than our originally planned trip. Giamani put us up in a hotel that night at their cost and paid for a very nice dinner for us all. The next morning we were off to sea on the alternative boat. There were loads of staff taking care of everything with the combined crews. Giamani also brought all of the food and bedding materials for the trip. They worked around the clock to get everything prepared in a short time.
You say the alternative boat was just waiting for its annual maintenance. We think the problems on that boat go way deeper than just needing annual maintenance. The ceilings had extensive leaks
throughout the boat, some of which weren't apparent until it set off with movement. The dining area ceilings were dropping brown water on the dining table soon after we set off, before the rain even started. This looks to us like it will require
extensive repairs, based upon what we saw. The alternative boat had just run a trip a few weeks ago --- check out this review from divezone.net, which explains exactly what we experienced:
SY Diva Andaman Liveaboard Review – Phuket, Similan Islands, Surin Islands, Thailand Dive Boat Reviews posted by Farshad Danicek on April 8, 2018. This means they've run their own charters with the deplorable conditions we saw - previous to stopping for the season for maintenance. Also, the alternative boat gave us their own boat briefing when we got on, never mentioning one thing about leaks or roaches, or what to do about them.
You say that the boat we were on is much more comfortable than Giamani even with a few leaks. That is SOOO not the case. We had reserved the Master Suite on the Giamani. We would have been in comparative blissful luxury to be in that cabin, with no filthy water pouring on our bodies and belongings, without roaches crawling everywhere. That was a horrific experience. Running up to the dining room benches to try to lay down for sleep in the middle of the night, only to be rained on with brown water from those ceilings too, wasn't even a workable solution. 2 nights of little sleep because of being soaked with dirty water, and with roaches crawling around in the kitchen, dining room, cabins and bathrooms was unbearable, and we were so grossed out. Giamani did the right thing in cutting the trip even shorter based on those conditions.
Giamani refunded us all for a
substantial portion of our trip, in addition to the hotel and dinner costs the night before the trip. And, despite all of the misery the alternative boat caused us, the Giamani crew made a herculean effort to make the trip fun and managed to salvage 9 incredible dives for us. We would venture to say that Giamani made no money whatsoever from our trip, and quite possibly were in "the red" on this one. We're not saying that the owners and crew of the alternative boat were not nice to us in our interactions with them - because they were. And, this was definitely not the alternative boat
crew's fault - they were great. If we were the owner of the alternative boat, there's no WAY we would have let any passengers on it in its present condition.
We have absolute trust and respect for the Giamani operation and crew after this experience, and we would unquestionably trust them for a future trip on their boat.
This writing is solely us speaking our opinions (and facts) from our experience - and we don't know what Giamani would say about it -- they maybe would not want us to go into these details on the alternative boat. We wouldn't have wanted to do that either - had we not read the previous post, and felt the need to set the record straight for the 100% responsibility the Giamani took for this trip.