OP
Boats with Marine Park permits
- Thread starter Christi
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
RockiesFan
Banned
This is where we disagree, I believe enforcement is an intertwined issue. Let me clarify my point. Your original post serves as a reminder to consumers/potential clients to use only permitted authorized boats. I understand and accept the reasoning behind it. My contention is that informing us on the board is useless unless some sort of effective enforcement program is in place.
Last edited:
K
KeithG
Guest
This smells a bit like the Toronto taxi industry.
Basically all the available licenses are owned by people who rent them to drivers after forcing the driver to buy a car from the license owner.
Licenses were once worth around $360k but Uber showed up and now they have dropped to $100k. This won't happen with the park. It could be even worse.
The following link is an interesting read. It deals with the nasty side of limited pre-allocated licenses.
How Uber is ending the dirty dealings behind Toronto's cab business - The Globe and Mail
RockiesFan
Banned
If you own a permit, of course you have to protect your own business interests. I have no problem with that concept, but putting the onus on customers to ensure they are only using permitted boats is a backwards approach. Most people vote with their wallets and are not going to ask a ton of questions about whether the boat has proper credentials.
OP
Again - that issue is being addressed with appropriate authorities, but it is much more complicated than just having the marine park boats out there. The awareness is one (BIG) step towards bringing awareness and enforcement.
We aren't "putting it on you" - if you don't care, then you don't care. All I did was provide the information that is publicly available in response to the MANY people who have asked MANY times over the years "how do we know if our boat is legal". Here is how you know. Original post edited to make that clarification.
And as far as protecting our interests, it goes so far beyond that. What happens when you're diving with an operation that is not a registered business, that has no insurance, no legal papers, etc. ? It's so much bigger than the legal operations not wanting competition - the illegals are NOT our competition.
Kind of like immigration laws - you're welcome, you just have to do it legally.
Last edited:
While my opinion is of no consequence, I don't see where this is one of the problems. The govt could hand out permits like candy but then you might see every stray captain with a boat decide to try their hand at being a dive op. While that would probably drive down prices and divers might enjoy $50 dive trips, it would also likely see a big increase in dive accidents and a loss of some of the best dive ops on the island. I just haven't seen any dive owners complaining that there are not enough permits or that they are too hard to get.
DjDiverDan
Contributor
Dive Ops that already have permits have no incentive to lobby for more permits to be issued, and without enforcement, neither do the owners of unpermitted boats. Giffenk mentioned the Toronto taxi market, and the New York taxi market went through much the same thing. Taxi companies, and the owners of valuable New York taxi medallions, both actively lobbied to keep the number of taxi medallions strictly limited, and at one time a New York City taxi medallion was worth over $250,000. But the demand was there for more taxi service, and even before Uber and Lyft came into the City, Gypsy cabs were widespread. And after Uber and Lyft showed up, that artificial value of taxi medallions started to fall pretty quickly. But the value never was real - it was an artificial effect of government stifling competition, the result of corrupt crony capitalism.
I understand and agree with the notion that safety concerns require some kind of regulation of both boats and Dive Ops in the Marine Park. But in order for these boat permits to have such a high value, there has to be a government-sanctioned monopoly value created by the strict limits on the number of available permits, meaning that competition and the interests of consumers is suffering. I’m not going to complain at all about the price of a day of diving in Cozumel - it’s about the most cost-friendly place to dive in the Caribbean. But restricting competition like that is an abuse of government power. Set whatever standards are necessary to insure safety, then issue as many permits as there are qualified boat owners and operators who can meet the standards. And impose a fee sufficient to cover enforcement costs.
And some ops don't own any...
JFS
Contributor
Best way to address the enforcement issue is for all legal shops to stop buying the parque marino bracelets...after the shortfall of revenue,maybe then they will send out boats often to check who is legal in the protected Federal Marine Park. Just make sure you have extras on your boat if you do get stopped.
I think comparisons of the dive charter industry and taxis are off base. Taxis are usually a monopoly, or at least an oligopoly within a service area. The dive industry is anything but. Given that long list, there are only a handful of dive ops that own more than 5 boats and seems to me most have 1 or 2. I'm certainly not seeing any lack of competition.
Similar threads
