PADI Baseline Course Price List

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Your costs are your costs. The only intangibles are time, yours and theirs. They need to feel like you have valued their time highly in order to receive the impression of value.

Most shops do this by making the courses very quick. The other way is to make the student believe that you have used their time well, and that your time is valuable. Your time is valued, by them, by how "good" you are. This is a combination of reputation, skill, ease of knowledge transfer and the "extras" you bring to the table. Their time investment is most often valued after the course, when they look back and see how much fun they had, the "before and after" of their skills/knowledge, and the comparison with others who have done the same course elsewhere.

Trace, as an example, has a sterling reputation on this Board and elsewhere. He is a former Training Director for an agency and is actively doing the diving that students want to be doing. His skills are available to see on videos and are in no doubt. That will get students in the door since his time is valuable.

From everything I have heard, he is great at knowledge transfer and the "fun factor" and his students compare very favourably with the product of other instructors. It is no surprise that he gets as many referrals as he does, since they feel their time well spent.

As an independent, you will NOT be able to compete with large shops wrt cost, you can only compete with value.
Make sure you value your student's time and work on increasing the value of your own time. In the meantime, pricing similarly to the shops may not lead to big profit but it will begin to get you referrals which will allow you to increase your price over time.

In the meanwhile, ask yourself "Which scuba instructors do I know by name?" and then ask yourself why you know them. What did they do to draw your attention? This will help guide you moving forward.
 
My OW class was $495 but it included everything but Mask Fins boots n snorkel. Those had to be supplied by the student but EVERYTHING else was covered in the price. Overall I feel pretty good about it.
 
I realize this post is old but, I do ask a similar question.. if an instructor has the student complete the theory portion online, provides rental gear, what other cost is there to the instructor? process the cert card? and obviously their time.. what is the actual cost to certify an OW diver? thanks!
Rental gear purchase, maintence , repairs, depreciation , air fills, insurance on rental gear liability, professional liability insurance, transportation costs, time it takes to conduct class, pool access rental costs, dive site entry fees, and more. Be sure to charge enough to cover all expenses and pay for your time .
 
My PADI OW course was USD 440 per person. In Boracay that was a standard price as all dive centers agreed on foxed price. I saw that in some countries these courses are slightly cheaper, however, i received a really good value. At first, there was instructor and 2 students only (me and my wife). Course lasted 5 days (we had time to watch all videos, read books, do absolutely all skills until instructor was comfortable that we mastered them). We had personal attention, very thorough instructor and were extremely happy with our course.

When i did AOW in Thailand, course was taken with other 7 people. Also, when we had night dive it was very uncomfortable as there were many dive groups which were intermixed with our group during dive. I made a mistake and followed the wrong group. Then had to ascend, find my group and proceed woth night dive. Here it is very important not how much you are paying but what value you are getting.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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