It's not that big a deal. No one is peeling off my suit but me. I dump it in a tank. Sometimes I take it out myself and hang it up to dry on the provided hangers at the provided area. Sometimes a staff member fishes my suit out of the tank and hangs it for me. They keep it overnight. If it is concierge service, my suit is waiting for me on my boat in the a.m., sometimes even in my preferred seating position. Other places I dive, even without concierge service, has a rinse tank, hanging area and stores it overnight. Next morning, I just pull it out myself. No biggie either way. But why would I have to haul it or wear it back to my room . . .this makes no sense to me until my trip has ended. Been wracking my brain but can't recall one place in the world other than Cozumel, where I've had to for this.
It's even worse if you have to taxi back from the boat. Dragging a dripping wetsuit through a fancy hotel is bad enough, but I really feel bad inflicting a urine-soaked dripping wetsuit on a poor cabdriver's trunk.
I suppose Cozumel is different in that, unlike many other dive locales, they don't have shops near the boat where one can store one's gear in a locker or secured room, with rinse tanks for rinsing gear. Except for the hotels that have onsite shops, divers are usually picked up by boat. Some ops don't valet any dive gear and your hotel room becomes your gear storage. Apparently the majority of valet services in Cozumel don't valet wetsuits, unlike in the rest of the civilized dive world, so your hotel room becomes your wetsuit locker. Hopefully you have a balcony where it can air dry after you soak it in the shower and use up the towels you would have used on yourself to instead dry up the resulting puddles on the floor, or else risk a dangerous slip and fall on the marble that they love to put in Mexican hotel rooms. Or, if you don't have a balcony, the wetsuit stays in the shower so that you can drip water everywhere on the trip back to the dive boat - at least this time, the puddles left behind aren't urine-tinged.
Not that the shops that provide rinse tanks for customer use are such a great alternative as studies have shown they're usually a prime breeding ground for nasty bacteria. I liked the way Ed Robinson's did it. As soon as they pull their boat out of the water (slip fees are way too expensive in Hawaii for the average dive op), they'd fill a plastic trashcan with fresh soapy water and have the suits washed and already hanging up to dry before the last passengers were off the boat.
I don't mind looking after my own gear if there's a reasonably close place to store it. I suppose I could take advantage of the onsite dive op and use their facilities, except that I don't want to dive with them. Fortunately I lucked into one of the few ops that valet wetsuits that coincidentally happens to be owned by the best DM I've ever experienced, an excellent combination. Were it not for that shop, I'd probably avoid Cozumel entirely, in favor of a more dive-friendly island.
There's another way to get around this and that's renting a wetsuit. From the website of Dive Paradise, a non-valet dive op and the largest dive op in Cozumel: "
Can I rent everything?
Yes, if you want to keep your trip hassle free. We keep our equipment in top working order and much of it is less than 2 years old. You can also rent a camera if you just want to try one for a day! Come in and see what we have. Arrange for it ahead of time and all you do is just board the boat, and it will be onboard waiting for you. On returning, you don't have to worry about all the equipment rinsing etc. We take care of everything!" So apparently even a non-valet non-wetsuit-handling dive op can become fully valet just by using their gear.
