As many of you already know, boats like the GE are pretty much sold out for exclusive
weekend day only trips usually a year in advance. When the trip schedules come up
for renewal/reloading for the next year, with very few exceptions previous customers
have priority on the same weekends the following year. For the GE anyway, the
returning customers almost always renew. When they don't, their trips are offered to
another returning charter who might want the trip to expand their own schedule.
Now that doesn't mean that you can't get an exclusive charter on the GE, you would
have to accept a M-F date instead. But, with a M-F trip, usually a reduced charter
cost can be negotiated.
I can tell you that if you do charter the boat yourselves, your per diver costs will
normally be less than booking a set number of spots from a shop on one of their charters... as long as you can fill the boat to the break point. What's that point?
depends on how much space you are willing to share with everyone
.
headhunter:
I heard back from The Great Escape.
They are also referring us to the dive shops that have already chartered the boat.
This inability to work with some boats directly may narrow our choices, which is not all together a bad thing, in my opinion.
If we come up with an area in which none of the boats will work with us directly, then I'll approach the diveshops for that area. Hopefully, this will not be the case and we'll be able to come up with a complete 2006 schedule by the end of this year.
Christian
edit: In re-reading my post, I see that I may have mistakenly given the impression that The Great Escape was not willing to work with us directly. Actually, all of the dates for 2006 are already taken which means that we would be working with the dive shops that have chartered the boat for those dates instead of directly with the boat.
