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

[drrich2]

It seems to me that diving in general has a pretty high attrition rate. I'm not in the industry so I haven't bothered to find the statistics, but I was under the impression that the number of people who go on to be regular divers is but a small fraction of the number who either initially do a DSD or get their OWD cert.

I wonder how this compares to % retention amongst people who try golf, tennis or skiing?

This forum tends to draw avid divers, so some may unconsciously assume anyone who got down on a scuba dive with a pretty reef and nice conditions should be enthralled and want to start saving for dive trips (or local diving in California, Florida, etc...), and if they don't, the course must've been bad. But we aren't representative of the general public, or general vacationers.

One practical intervention you might get started is a pre-course questionnaire asking some questions such as whether the student is interested in a once-and-done bucket list experience, loosely interested and unlikely to get serious but who knows, or thinks this might just be a new passion. My wording needs work, but you get the idea. The goal is to get data on what % of DSD students are potential ongoing divers; without that, it's hard to judge what to make of claims that retention is too low.

Most parasailers won't become hang glider enthusiasts no matter what you do.

 

[Darcy Kieran]

It seems to me that diving in general has a pretty high attrition rate. I'm not in the industry so I haven't bothered to find the statistics...

.

I wonder how this compares to % retention amongst people who try golf, tennis or skiing?

The number of active scuba divers is shrinking among the American population – that is from a reliable annual survey from SFIA and OIA. It means that we start the year with a certain number of active divers, we add new certs and new DSDs, and we end we less than we started with...

I compared it to snorkeling, swimming, SUP, and surfing:

Scuba Diving Participation Rate & Statistics 2021

Good idea about comparing to golf and skiing. I will do that!

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Why not? SDI brought it down to 2:1.

There is a different culture at SDI. Changing a mindset is non-trivial. There is also the attitude "we are the biggest, therefore we are the best" that also needs to be overcome. Can you cite an example where voicing concerns/discussing solutions has been successful?

Changes have to start somewhere. Voicing concerns and discussing solutions is usually a start.

I think Andy Davis did an excellent writeup on the scuba industry here: An Evaluation of the Modern Scuba Diving Training Industry %

Understanding which group(s) that agencies target makes their standards and business practices clarifies things (to me at least). I'd argue that agencies like GUE and UTD target the highly committed divers. RAID targets highly commited divers and hobbyist divers. SDI targets highly-commited, hobbyist, and occassional divers. PADI and SSI target occassional and experiential divers. This is simply my perception. I sure hope no one twists this into an accusation of agency bashing. I think the results speak for themselves in terms of size. In any activity, the number of hardcore people is small relative to people who dabble. Using skiing as a comparison, how many people chuck themselves off cliff versus versus cruise the blues? I used to chuck myself off small cliffs when I lived near Tahoe, but at the age of 25, I discovered I was too old for that $hit.

One thing to address the introductory scuba experience problem is reducing ratios. That increases cost. Either dive centers will raise prices or be less profitable. Econ 101 tells us that by raising prices, demand will go down. Agencies fulfill fewer c-cards. Hence there has been a race to the bottom.

Raising the bar of instructors requires more training which also increases cost and by having stricter examination requirements, fewer new instructors. Fewer instructors means fewer dive pro fees.

From a pure business point of view, I don't see many agencies getting on board with improving introductory scuba experiences.

Please tell me how I am wrong.

If we understand what agencies are focused on, what they determine their revenue stream to be, then their behavior/standards/enforcement (or lack thereof) all makes sense.

I think a better metric is identifying of the four subgroups of divers, how are the numbers changing year to year. If the top 3 groups are stable and growing, but the experiential divers is plummeting, I don't have a problem with that. Of course, when I open a dive center, I will target the top three subgroups, but still service the experiential, though I'll probably price myself out of that one. And that's okay.

 

[drrich2]

I compared it to snorkeling, swimming, SUP, and surfing:

Skimmed through some of your article; quite a lot there! When considering participation by casual divers and snorkelers in 2020 and 2021, the 15 month veritable shutdown of ocean cruising out of the U.S. should be factored it. I don't know how much of the casual diver market is wrapped up in cruise ship based excursions, but it's got to be a chunk. Cruising is a key entry way for introduction to foreign travel to many, and it was for my wife and I.

Richard.

 

[Searcaigh]

I'm pretty sure though that most outdoor pursuits are in decline due to many youngsters sitting on their arses playing computer games and very few have outdoor interests. Living in colder climates also doesn't help in our hobby either especially if the water gets hard in winter.

I believe that playing computer games is being considered to be an Olympic sport in the near future too.

 

[kelemvor]

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.

That does seem odd. Most people who post online about having done discover scuba mention it being a good experience. I never did it, as I had never heard of discover scuba until long after I was certified.

I'm pretty sure though that most outdoor pursuits are in decline due to many youngsters sitting on their arses playing computer games and very few have outdoor interests.

This. I've got two kids in their early 20's. My daughter is certified because I nudged her in that direction. Both of my kids, and the vast majority of their friends do everything online. Getting them to go across town for anything is a big ask, asking them to travel to a dive destination would be wasted breath. The covid lockdowns affected that generation much less than us older folks who prefer in-person interactions.

 

[MtnDiverColorado]

Couple thoughts...

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

Who is 'we'? In my very limited experience with diving, I have noted a dramatic difference in quality regarding various dive operations, and dive instructors. Some are excellent, some aren't. My wife's introduction to diving through an open water course in Bora Bora during our honeymoon, was so awful, that she quit, and didn't think about diving for another 20 years.

20 years later, she had an amazing experience with a 'resort course' on the great barrier reef, looked at certification again, had a great experience with her instructor, and diving is now one of her most favorite activities.... Really tough imho, to generalize about the dive industry.. Lousy operations should change how they provide “Discover Scuba Diving” experiences, good ones, perhaps not.

A few years back, as a marketing initiative, their training agency shared with them, monthly, the list of people who had done a scuba tryout the month before, somewhere on the planet.

The owner of that dive center hired a marketing person dedicated to following up on these people. He thought he had found fortune! That was before he started contacting these people and realized the number of negative responses they got was out of this world.

The vast majority (70%+) of people they called told them about an awful experience. These scuba tryout participants didn’t want to even think about scuba diving again.

As some one who has had the misfortune of using "lead lists" in the past, when attempting to start out, I chuckled at this. You initially think 'OMG, this is great, look at all these people I can call who are interested in my products and services...' Only to discover that virtually none are, and folks aren't very nice about telling you so... A 30% positivity rate seems pretty good.... but I would take this with a grain of salt before drawing conclusions regarding folks experiences as whole....

Would be curious to read the thoughts of some Scubaboard posters (if there are any) who have experience offering resort courses, do 70% really have a bad time? What do you think your satisfaction rate is?

Again, just my .02

 

[Outbound]

I'm pretty sure though that most outdoor pursuits are in decline due to many youngsters sitting on their arses playing computer games and very few have outdoor interests. Living in colder climates also doesn't help in our hobby either especially if the water gets hard in winter.

I believe that playing computer games is being considered to be an Olympic sport in the near future too.

I think this is entirely too reductive. The outdoor recreation sector accounts for some $410 billion each year, and it has been growing. That includes everything from fishing to rock climbing to diving and everything in between. If anything, the pandemic has caused a major increase in outdoor recreation, as people turned to the outdoors to get in some socially distanced fun and adventure. Try finding a solo canoe in stock these days, for example.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

In my area the DSD concept was more along the lines of discover diving by freediving first, since most of the people going into the dive shops around here were buying gear related to abalone diving, and that was a freediving activity.
So for me, I first got into diving as a skin diver (freediver) because I am a lifetime sportsman and outdoorsman and hunting abalone and fish was what I did. I got into scuba years later through the same shop because I had plans to go lobster diving in SoCal plus I kept hearing stories about how great getting rock scallops was.
By the time I got certified I already had hundreds of hours underwater freediving off our coast in all sorts of conditions so scuba was very easy to transition to.
Many of our locals are in a similar situation, they
dive for game and from there scuba exploration happens and then looky loo sight seeing happens too. They might also go on vacation dives around the world when time and money allow.
Maybe they are more dedicated than others because of the fact that they wanted it bad enough that they overcame the difficulties of getting certified here locally so they are just more dedicated by default?
I could see how quarry divers, cave divers, and North East divers would be in a similar boat.
These are your core divers that are in it for life.
And by the way, these divers are dying out and there is not a big pool of new divers replacing them. You might call it the end of an era.

There does seem to be a line between vacation divers and local divers, I hate to say it.
People who only want to dive in warm tropical waters seem to be more finicky. They are also more affected by disturbances in travel glitches and world events since most rely on air travel. Things like economic downturns, airline prices, excessive baggage fees, overzealous TSA agents, political unrest, Covid, etc. has a drastic affect on these people and their vacations.
Local divers seem to continue to dive through all these things since all they need is an air fill and some gas in the truck.
I think a lot of the industry downturns have to do with this second subgroup. I don’t think it’s so much bad instruction or any particular quirk in training or how it’s run, I think it’s economics, increasing cost of living, and life getting in the way in general that’s affecting diving (and many other leisure activities).
I think the downturn in scuba participation is a lot bigger and more complex than thinking it’s all an internal problem within the scuba industry.

 

[Jcp2]

I think we are referring to the North American market shrinking. Other countries that have a growing middle class with increased discretionary income are likely seeing a growth in general leisure spending that includes scuba. Maybe I should come up with a graph that correlates red meat consumption with scuba diving. The r value would be quite high.