Is it time to kill DSDs and go back to the drawing board?

[Darcy Kieran]

I think the current scuba tryouts / discover scuba diving (DSDs) are... Bad.

I shared my points of view here:

Should We Change the Way We Provide “Discover Scuba Diving” Experiences?

I would really like to hear your feedback on this topic!! I would like to keep on figuring out solutions.

Thanks!

 

[Jcp2]

I've never tried SNUBA (if that's what it's called), only because I didn't realize that was an option. Certainly, for smaller people who aren't as strong and not interested in going under when surface conditions aren't great (snorkelers) it would be a wonderful opportunity to be weightless and amongst the fish, rather than above them. Would it require a surface spotter and attendant in addition to the underwater instructor/guide? No rental BC's to deal with, and tank management would be different. At such shallow depths no risk of DCS and maybe two people could be supplied with one Al80?

 

[shurite7]

The premise of the article is intriguing. But there are couple of things about the article that are questionable.

Where did you get the information that 70% of the people who participated in a DSD / resort course did not have a good experience? When I lived in the islands I conducted around 150 in less than a year and not a single person walked away unhappy or with a bad experience. It seems your claim comes from hear-say comments from other people or from the internet. List your sources to back up your claim to make yourself credible.

In the quality assurance section you claim the latest instructor graduate is the one conducting a resort course instead of an experienced instructor. Where did you get that information? What is the proof of that? Support your claims with good solid data!!

When it comes to DSDs / resort course dives I have my thoughts. After doing lots of them I walked away saying I’ll never do another one again. Yet, if I owned a resort in the tropics and had an ideal spot to conduct DSDs then I would absolutely conduct them - they are a money maker.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I’ve never been involved with DSD programs even though I’ve DM’d many open water classes locally.
DSD is something we just don’t do here.
However, I have heard horror stories through the years about DSD dives in tourist locations including people dying.
Just based on second hand information, I would say DSD programs would need to be more thorough before they take them into open water, and then once in open water they need to keep them shallow enough that getting them to the surface in the case of a problem would be easy.
I’m in the camp of make it better or dump it.
It sounds to me like the program ran off the rails in pursuit of profits.
Scuba is easy, until it’s not. When they reach the point that it’s not easy or fun anymore is when the untrained get into serious trouble and don’t have the knowledge or experience to do anything about it.
DSD is the ultimate “trust me” (and trust the gear) dive.

Why does the scuba industry need to grow?
Is it for profits?
Would it perhaps be better to have a smaller better trained community of divers in the world instead of a hoard of incompetent reef smashers?
Is it just for gear sales or selling classes?

There’s another thread about the money that instructors make. The number one complaint is that they are used for slave labor and in some cases they lose money teaching. Wouldn’t it be better to increase the cost of training so instructors could actually make something even at the cost of losing overall student volume?
If you lose a dollar on one hundred individual sales how much money have you lost?
If you make a dollar on twenty five individual sales how much money have you made?
That’s kind of my point.

 

[Darcy Kieran]

Where did you get the information that 70% of the people who participated in a DSD / resort course did not have a good experience? (...) List your sources to back up your claim to make yourself credible.

Thanks for your feedback. However... I explained, at length, in the first part of the article how that study was done.

When I lived in the islands I conducted around 150 in less than a year and not a single person walked away unhappy or with a bad experience.

Congrats! So you are part of those instructors providing an awesome underwater experience. 100% customer satisfaction is impressive! Keep it up! We need more like you.

 

[Marie13]

A lot of shops in the Chicago area offer DSDs. They are almost always done in a pool. I think the local quarry might offer DSDs, but not sure.

 

[Outbound]

A lot of shops in the Chicago area offer DSDs. They are almost always done in a pool. I think the local quarry might offer DSDs, but not sure.

Same here in Michigan. I'm not sure how many people they end up attracting in the long run. I only have some anecdotal data from a few folks I've met who, when they find out I dive, said "Oh, I tried one of those discover things in a pool and never went back." For some people they just didn't like the feeling period. For others, they said that they might be interested in doing it somewhere where they could actually see some stuff (meaning tropical water, but maybe a quarry too), but the pool just wasn't that interesting. On the flip side, all things being equal, a nice, shallow confined place like a pool is less likely to have safety issues or to freak people out than in open water.

I did SNUBA a number of years ago in Hawaii, before I was certified. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I was already a pretty avid snorkeler and had been a competitive swimmer who was very comfortable in the water. The only thing I didn't like about the experience was that I was tethered, via the same AL80 on a float at the surface, to a woman who freaked out the minute she stepped into the water. I was off and running and couldn't figure out why the damn raft/tank wouldn't budge. It was because she was on the surface yanking back as hard as she could. The guide eventually calmed her down enough that she decided to enter the water. But she clung to the raft on the surface and didn't descend. At least I got to move around a bit more and see some stuff along the reef.

 

[tursiops]

Let's see if I got this right: people dislike or have bad DSD experiences because the instructors are awful.
So let's keep the same instructors, call it something else, use SNUBA, and see if that helps?

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Discussing the poor experiences of some DSD/Try scuba participants can to lead to a rathole of other topics.

I support DSD/Try Scuba experiences as you can draw in people who didn't plan on diving at all, and do it on a whim. Provide quality equipment (should be a no brainer, but we all know this isn't universally true), don't rush (again, should be a no brainer) so that people are relaxed and enjoy themselves, and don't use these experiences as a loss leader.

Just like there are many poor OW classes that cause people to quit before they've started, there are going to be a lot of poor DSD/Try Scuba experiences that will drive people away from getting certified.

I have no idea how to fix that. Or I should say, I have no realistic idea on how to fix that.

I've seen some videos of some pretty incredible stuff. This 18 year old instructor in a BP/W as well as his 4 participants, backfinning monitoring the participants (though as always, if there is an incident, you will see you don't have control of the participants). But this instructor did his homework. Got the participants properly weighted. Not sure what he did to ensure his customers were all comfortable in the water (my guess not much was needed), but it appeared to be a good example of what makes up a positive experience.

I think a better discussion should focus on how to improve the DSD/Try Scuba experience (what to do and what not to do).

One thing is for sure, when providing DSD/Try Scuba experiences, a dive center needs a wide range of masks to ensure a proper fit for each customer. An improperly fitting mask is just asking for trouble.

Not sure how I feel about SNUBA. But I'm dead set against doing away with these experiences. If done properly, they are a great offering in the dive industry. But that's a big if.

 

[drrich2]

You wrote in your article "One of its purposes is to be a money-making activity for numerous resorts. The number of scuba tryouts done annually around the planet is significantly higher than the number of entry-level certifications — somewhere between 6 and 10 times more.

The second role of discover scuba diving (DSD) is to be a marketing tool we use to provide a chance to taste the underwater world, in the hope of recruiting students for the open water (entry-level) diver course."

What is the customer base's purpose for it? What does the customer want? For example, I wonder what % of people enrolling in DSD classes have which of these goals:

1.) Try it once out of curiosity, like people on a cruise parasailing or someone who wants to skydive once in their life. Bucket list.

2.) Try it out of curiosity, no clear expectation either way as to continuing. Want to know more about it. Personal enrichment.

3.) Try it on for size, hoping to make it an occasional activity going forward. Continuing source of experiences.

If we visited a cruise port parasailing operator and said >90% of your clients never parasail again so you're a failure, that wouldn't be right. But if most people taking a DSD would become long-term divers if they had a good experience, that's another thing.

So, it'd be useful to either find a DSD type program that you're confident really does a superb job, or pool people who've been through one and affirm they had a subjectively good experience. Out of this group, what % go on to get OW cert. and continue diving?