I was in Australia for diving just once in my life, I had just three days to spend on a LOB in Cairns, and I was there with my family: the wife is also a CMAS instructor, as me, and our sons were 12 and 17.
They were both PADI OW certified, and they got their AOW during this trip. We did choose Pro Dive Cairns as they were the cheapest, and when you choose cheap of course you do not have great expectations. But we were on a strict budget, having to pay for all 4 of us...
Actually our low expectations were exceeded, Pro Dive Cairns revealed to be a solid organization, and my sons got a very good instructor, which was capable of being patient despite the language barrier and the fact that my younger son is dyslexic, so reading the manual, in English, was really hard for him, and the instructor did take the time, between one dive and the other, to slowly explains him all what was required to know.
The program was 11 dives in 3 days, which is really hard for us: we are used, here in the med, to make just one dive per day, max two in exceptional cases.
Se we made only 10 of the 11 dives, jumping over what was planned to be the "best one", a deep dive to 30+ meters on the early morning of day 3. As the previous evening we had 4 dives culminating with a night dive in the middle of a dozen of sharks, which had been just fed with the remaining of the dinner, we did not have enough juice for waking up at 6 o'clock and make a very demanding dive on the morning of day 3.
The Great Barrier revealed to us to be not so great, at least comparing to some more spectacular sites here in the med or at Maldives. My wife was particularly not satisfied of the choice of diving sites, it was evident that this operator brings back repeatedly their customers in the same 11 sites, so there was nothing "adventurous".
However for a family trip with our sons not yet well experienced it was globally a good experience, certainly a very good training for my sons, and everything was perfectly safe, well planed and executed.
So I think that for a not very experienced diver, wanting to improve his skills while enjoying some nice coral reefs, Pro Dive Cairns is a good choice.
For a more experienced diver, searching for more adventurous sites, probably there are better choices.
Please note that my experience is quite outdated, as that trip to Australia was in 2007 ! So, many things could be changed from then....
