MHK
Guest
Spectre once bubbled...
Even if/when GUE starts an OW program, I don't expect it to take off like the others. It'll be a back-room, word of mouth thing that sits in it's own little niche and holds it's own. There is no way GUE will be able to compete with the likes of PADI, NAUI et. al. without sacrificing quality.
GUE will never be able to compete with the walk-in basic OW customer. It'll all be from people that heard about GUE from a diving friend.
I suspect this analysis is the closest to reality that can be predicted at this point. Bear in mind GUE was not started, nor does it exsist, to be in direct competition from mainstream agencies. Our goal is to offer an alternative, not just offer a different set of letters in the alphabet soup of diving agencies.
The entire underlying premise of this thread so squarely misses the GUE objective that it's almost beyond the scope of response. .
Some are interested in classes that provide for laxed insistence on gear configuration, buddy diving, classroom requirements, et. al.. Anyone seeking that kind of training and approach certainly doesn't need, yet another, agency to provide that kind of training since several agencies already exsist to provide that option. Whereas, other divers are commited to more standardized gear configuration, more team oriented diving, more disciplined academics and so forth.. For those divers, we believe GUE offers an alternative and we remain commited to keeping true to our core beliefs.. We fully recognize that the training that we offer is not for everyone, which quite frankly is fine with us. We want to remain small, niche and/or elite and any suggestion that we need to compromise our core beliefs so we can be more "inclusive" misses the whole point. We don't want to "include" divers that believe solo diving or deep air diving or some of the other more relaxed ideas that allow for "inclusion" mandate. If that means we are "exclusive" or "not inclusive" then so be it, but to sacrafice a core belief to be an "inclusive" agency or to increase market share is the polar opposite paradigm of why JJ started GUE..
Hope that helps.