If they don't want my business, I'll be happy to not give them ANY of it.
WreckWriter:
I dont' think I made a bad deal in Hawaii - the referral cert was $400 for both of us - i.e. $200 a piece. Most of the sites I looked at on the PADI website were pretty competetively priced.
In any event, I don' t think the LDS necesarilly should compensate me for having to finish my certification at tourist prices - that's the way the cookie crumbled.
It would have been nice if they'd referred me to a dive shop that they had heard good things about - they didn't, and I did expect that they make some effort to do so.
As a result, I picked the one that was closest to the hotel I was staying at and got lucky as we enjoyed our teacher and class a great deal.
$200 isn't much more expensive than a referral would've cost in my home area.
I arrived at the $300 figure by roughly judging the price difference shops charge for full versus referral certs - usually just under 50% of the cost of a full cert., at least in my area.
The shop is small, and while I'm not positive, I don't think they have a fill station to fill their own tanks.
I hadn't even thought about the liability issue that many of you raised about sending their customers home with tanks that have air in them. I agree, it's not a good idea.
As far as not being able to commit myself 100% to the OW cert., forgive me, but I think some of you guys are a bit off base on this one. They told me it would take two weekends, and we did commit ourselves 100% for two weekends.
Yes, trying to get this done before the honeymoon made scheduling changes difficult to handle, and I did not expect the LDS to do anything out of the ordinary to handle my wife's inability to dive due to illness.
I feel like I'm about 10% responsible for not being able to dive on the weekend I was scheduled. You may disagree, and that's fine.
Unexpected events happen to everyone whether they're in the midst of getting married or not. We had 3 weekends blocked out during which we had no commitments - the rough part was that none of them were consecutive. With better luck we would've been able to complete the course without a problem.
With better planning and responsibility the LDS would've been able to at least get me certified with no problem.
The LDS owes me money because I paid for services that they did not render. They owe me more than $130 because I'm pretty sure that the costs of those services (boat, tanks, rentals,instructor) cost more than that. The LDS didn't have to pay for these things for me, but I paid them to provide them.
Hope that makes the situation a little clearer.
One final thing - Mr SubMariner, why on earth does wanting to buy grey fins make me a difficult customer? My wife and I bought the same fins - the most expensive pair in the shop. The shop stocked only blue. When they sent me home with the Scubapro catalog I thumbed through it, realized that my fins were available in a different color (which matched my mask, and would make telling my wife's Medium sized fins apart from my Large sized fins much easier), I called to find out if I could exchange them.
After having the LDS employee tell me that I was wrong for five minutes, I politely informed him that I was staring at the very fins in the catalog. He persisted in telling me I was wrong, and in exasperation grabbed a catalog for himself, said 'uh.....oh...I guess they are available in grey.'
....and this makes M E the difficult one....WTF?????
I guess none of Submariner's gear matches, unless he was lucky and the dive shop had all the colors/styles available for him