If you were to redo the scuba industry how would you do it?

[VikingDives]

Unless the training is absolutely atrocious, the student doesn’t know any better.

Even if the training lacks any sort of quality, the student rarely knows.

I know of a local shop that teaches to imcompentently that their students don't swim during an OW course. They just go hand over hand down to 60+ feet and then back up again... That's their "swim."

No one (except for me) has complained and PADI did nothing because they are the highest producing shop in the area. . .

And they have a 4.8 or 4.9 rating on Google....

On the upside, the students they train become some of my best-paying advanced students because they've been trained so awfully, that I have to spend more time with them breaking bad habits than I do with my own OW students who learned to do things right from the beginning.

 

[SlugLife]

Even if the training lacks any sort of quality, the student rarely knows.

Apparently there's a local SideMount course that teaches everyone using normal backplate+wing BCDs, and he get great reviews too including from all the local dive-shops.

Obviously, I haven't taken his course but pretty much every competent SM diver I've come across says that's a giant red-flag, and for a good SM experience, you should be using a SM-specific BCD.

 

[PartFish]

I just want readily available parts and service manuals for all of my gear.

 

[SlugLife]

I just want readily available parts and service manuals for all of my gear.

 

[MrVegas]

Waivers absolutely do not protect dive operations and instructors from gross negligence.

This is a subtle point that is often missed. A Plaintiff can always allege gross negligence and attempt to describe facts meeting that standard in a complaint (as opposed to ordinary negligence). Then the case goes to discovery, and then after that, there has to be a judge willing to toss a case on a summary without letting the issue of ordinary\gross negligence go to a jury. If insurance companies can't predictably figure out the cases in which that will happen, then the cost of insurance will go up.

 

[51 years]

If you make it too complicated then people will just take a resort course so there can dive once a year. We have been trying for 50 years to figure this out. When you have a person who wants to dive forever then they will go thru whatever courses are required. It seems that for some people the resort course lights a fire to follow thru on more instruction etc. And yes swimming ability to some extent is required as the YMCA courses emphasized .

 

[boulderjohn]

If you make it too complicated then people will just take a resort course so there can dive once a year. We have been trying for 50 years to figure this out. When you have a person who wants to dive forever then they will go thru whatever courses are required. It seems that for some people the resort course lights a fire to follow thru on more instruction etc. And yes swimming ability to some extent is required as the YMCA courses emphasized .

40 years ago, I took a resort course in Hawai'i and would have gotten certified on the trip had I not then fought the surf (and the surf won).

Years later, My wife and I vacationed in Cozumel, and I took another resort course there. I loved it. When we decided to return to the island on another trip the following year, I decided I would get certified because I can't stand lying around on a beach. I did that on a trip to Puerto Vallarta. It was a simple, 3-day course that I later learned achieved that short schedule by skipping a large percentage of the requirements. It would be hard to find a certified diver who had less training than I had.

I decided that I would start the Cozumel adventure with more training, so I started with two days of AOW certification. I was the only student. The instructor did a good job of teaching me the skills I needed to be basically competent. I then did my first non-instructional dive, with a whopping 9 dives in my logbook.

That dive was transformative, and I decided that scuba was not going to be something I did for a day or two while on a semi-annual tropical vacation. My wife loved tropical vacations, and she loved to snorkel, and so even though she did not want to dive, she was happy to plan our vacations to diving meccas, and in the next few years, we visited different Caribbean isles, Australia, Fiji, and Florida. I was a dedicated tropical vacation, one trip a year, OW diver.

Then I did early retirement, and I decided that maybe I could do something with scuba during that time. I got my rescue certification and then went the professional route. In the decades that followed, one thing led to another, and I eventually became a trimix instructor and a cave diver with dive experiences all over the world.

None of those decades of dedicated diving would have happened if I had been forced to take a seriously long, complicated, and challenging OW certification course. I was looking for the cheapest and easiest way to get under water on a coming vacation. If it had been much harder than that to get certified, it never would have happened.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

40 years ago, I took a resort course in Hawai'i and would have gotten certified on the trip had I not then fought the surf (and the surf won).

Years later, My wife and I vacationed in Cozumel, and I took another resort course there. I loved it. When we decided to return to the island on another trip the following year, I decided I would get certified because I can't stand lying around on a beach. I did that on a trip to Puerto Vallarta. It was a simple, 3-day course that I later learned achieved that short schedule by skipping a large percentage of the requirements. It would be hard to find a certified diver who had less training than I had.

I decided that I would start the Cozumel adventure with more training, so I started with two days of AOW certification. I was the only student. The instructor did a good job of teaching me the skills I needed to be basically competent. I then did my first non-instructional dive, with a whopping 9 dives in my logbook.

That dive was transformative, and I decided that scuba was not going to be something I did for a day or two while on a semi-annual tropical vacation. My wife loved tropical vacations, and she loved to snorkel, and so even though she did not want to dive, she was happy to plan our vacations to diving meccas, and in the next few years, we visited different Caribbean isles, Australia, Fiji, and Florida. I was a dedicated tropical vacation, one trip a year, OW diver.

Then I did early retirement, and I decided that maybe I could do something with scuba during that time. I got my rescue certification and then went the professional route. In the decades that followed, one thing led to another, and I eventually became a trimix instructor and a cave diver with dive experiences all over the world.

None of those decades of dedicated diving would have happened if I had been forced to take a seriously long, complicated, and challenging OW certification course. I was looking for the cheapest and easiest way to get under water on a coming vacation. If it had been much harder than that to get certified, it never would have happened.

So obviously their theory worked.

 

[Belzelbub]

None of those decades of dedicated diving would have happened if I had been forced to take a seriously long, complicated, and challenging OW certification course. I was looking for the cheapest and easiest way to get under water on a coming vacation. If it had been much harder than that to get certified, it never would have happened.

Interesting. My approach to scuba was different. I got hooked on the underwater world after a snorkeling trip my family took while on vacation. I knew from that moment that I wanted to spend more time underwater, and for longer than a single breath at a time. I would have gone for a complicated and challenging course. But, as it turned out, my initial OW course likely rivaled the amount of training that yours did. I guess it was fine on the academics, but the checkout didn't even count as a dive per standards. I was certainly not ready to dive after that course. My next course was long, complicated, and challenging. YMCA course done through a university.

Your post did make me think of another option. There is a market for the resort courses. But, I don't think that OW should be taught in that way. As you mentioned, they were able to do this quickly by skipping a lot of requirements. Resort courses would be better suited to a Scuba Diver certification. They'll need to dive with a DM, but plenty of vacation divers do that any way. Then, perhaps have a discount rate for converting a Scuba Diver cert into an Open Water cert for those that want to pursue that.

 

[Lorenzoid]

None of those decades of dedicated diving would have happened if I had been forced to take a seriously long, complicated, and challenging OW certification course. I was looking for the cheapest and easiest way to get under water on a coming vacation. If it had been much harder than that to get certified, it never would have happened.

When my wife and I took the OW course in 1998, we weren't aware of any "resort course" option. As far as we knew, to go scuba diving it was necessary to take the OW course, and in planning our first trip to Australia we wanted to be able to do a scuba dive. Our course took place over three consecutive weekends and felt like a lot of work. When we got to Queensland we booked a dive and got dropped in 25 feet of water with some snorkelers. Again, as far as we knew, to breathe from a scuba tank you had pass a swim test, learn to use tables, buddy-breathe from a regulator, and all of that. If we had been aware of a cheaper and easier way to see stuff underwater, we almost certainly would have done that instead.