Post-pandemic comeback? Not yet! The dive industry is still crashing.

[boulderjohn]

As Alex Brylske keeps on saying, we need a new paradigm with a focus on diving, not on selling courses.

What does this 'focus on diving' look like that's different from what we have now? PadiTravel, Liveaboard.com, Maduro, Aggressor Fleet and Explorer Ventures send me e-mails promoting dive trips. A number of groups in my region offer dive trips. There's a local dive quarry with an on-site shop.

I have to echo drrich2. What would that new paradigm be? I, too, have a FaceBook feed and daily emails flooded with enticements for me to come and dive. I get several posts from PADI selling diving (not courses) every day.

Interestingly enough, several of the Colorado PADI shops switched to SSI a few years ago because they thought PADI had gone too far into pushing diving instead of courses. Those shops thought pushing diving was their job, and they did not want PADI competing with them. They did not want PADI sending emails to divers advertising dive trips, so they figured if they used a different agency for training, PADI would not have the emails.

 

[boulderjohn]

All good questions and all hard to answer with certainty, but I know I have some very good and active divers who recommend my shop and bring me new clients fairly regularly. I also know that by charging more for a course, I'm keeping my classes smaller and I'm driving away the bargain hunters.

Retention rate is customers retained over time. For example, when I worked for someone else's shop, I knew that 90% of the people I trained would never come back. They took their open water class, and were never seen again. That shop had a retention rate of 10%.

In my shop now, of the customers that we've trained, we've had almost everyone come back either to buy equipment, or to take training, or both.

I'd love to know what the magic ingredient is, but short of buying out an existing shop, I don't see how I'd be able to design an experiment to determine what the magic sauce is...

I have always felt that shops go wrong by minimizing training. When I was working on becoming an instructor long ago, I was diving in Key Largo. I saw a young woman who was obviously grossly overweighted and nearly crawling on the ocean floor. The look in her eyes shouted "I am not having any fun at all!" I swore then that no students of mine would ever look like that. Divers who finish their training with good buoyancy skills will have more fun than someone like that diver and will be more likely to continue.

However, I actually think that in that regard, things are likely better now than they used to be. The only real changes to OW standards in the past three decades have been additions to the requirements, and many of those additions involve a greater emphasis on buoyancy and trim. It is now a dozen years since PADI published its article on teaching students while neutrally buoyant from the start, and they have been increasing their emphasis on it. SDI and SSI are close to requiring it.

Having students leave your classes with good buoyancy skills does not require extra time or extra cost--it is just a matter of emphasis and technique. If a shop makes it a priority, they will get better students and greater retention. The owner of the shop I used to work for, however, greatly disagreed. He said it did not matter how an instructor taught, as long as he or she produced certified divers who could buy gear and book trips.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

The owner of the shop I used to work for, ... said it did not matter how an instructor taught, as long as he or she produced certified divers who could buy gear and book trips.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but how the instructor teaches has a significant impact on if and to what extent the student continues to dive, buy gear, book trips, etc..

It blows my mind how unaware dive shop owners can be.

I once had a phone conversation with someone about diving and when discussing their history, they mentioned that they were hooked on diving from an infectiously enthusiastic instructor. They signed up for a course at a LDS. The open water course just took them through the motions and had that been their first experience, they would not have gotten into scuba.

I don't know obviously to what extent instructors simply don't care about their students get into the sport, but it is one thing that should be considered in addressing.

 

[boulderjohn]

I was once part of a research team that examined 10 schools with greater student achievement than would be predicted by their demographics. Please note that this is different from saying "schools with high scores." When we selected schools, we found that the high schools with the highest supposed achievement actually had achievement levels that were lower than the middle schools that had sent them their students--on average, their students regressed while there. We instead studied schools that took students at one level of achievement and brought them to a higher level while they were in that school.

Our team was impressed by what we saw when we visited the schools. We all agreed that in our own careers, we had never seen anything like it. Our final report mirrored an earlier large scale research project known as Effective Schools. We concluded that the primary key was effective local leadership (the principal). The principal had helped create an effective staff that was enthusiastically dedicated to creating high student achievement. Here are only a few of our observations:

1. All 10 schools had mission statements calling for the them to succeed at creating high achievement for all students, not the typical meaningless "help students meet their potential" garbage.
2. Every single teacher we interviewed knew that mission statement and believed in it. There was not a single exception to this.
3. The school atmosphere was focused on achievement. Go into a typical high school and the first thing you would see is the display cases with athletic trophies. In contrast, in these schools, we saw displays of excellent student academic work.
4. We interviewed principals and staff members separately. We asked mostly the same questions. We got mostly the same answers. One of the questions we asked related to personal goals. In one school, a group of teachers responded by giving us the same personal goals we had already heard from the principal, and one of them said, "I'm pretty sure we can get the principal to go along with it." (Talking to the principal long after, he said he believed in a well run school, it is not clear who is coming up with the goals. He called it "leading from the middle.")

I believe the same should happen in a dive shop. I believe an owner who wants the best possible instruction can have it in no time, starting with almost any group of instructors. The instructional staff simply needs to know and believe that quality is important, and they need to have a clear vision of how to achieve it. As I indicated earlier, the dive shop owner for whom I used to work did not believe that mattered, so it didn't happen.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. OW course requirements call for students to spend time swimming freely as buddy teams. Their skills improve markedly as they do this. How much time they have for that depends upon how long everything else takes. Our shop rented a specific amount of time in a pool (and it was enough), and I made sure my last student was climbing the ladder as the second hand reached the end of our allotted time. Another instructor instead bragged about how quickly he was able to get the students through the course. He would announce how early he got the van and equipment back to the shop as if an early time was a badge of honor. The owner/Director of Instruction could have achieved a whole lot simply by saying, "I am paying for ample time in the pool for students to learn to dive, and I want you to use every second of the time I paid for to give them the best possible experience."

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Our shop rented a specific amount of time in a pool (and it was enough), and I made sure my last student was climbing the ladder as the second hand reached the end of our allotted time.

Same when I taught for a shop. When I finally figured out how to teach NB/T, I had an extra hour. I've used the ideas from the I2I post on "games" that help students dial in their buoyancy. These "games" also had prizes (like a "race" across the pool while carrying a golf ball on a spoon - you drop it and you have to go back to the start and go again). They loved it and it really helped them learn to fin smoothly.

 

[VikingDives]

Having students leave your classes with good buoyancy skills does not require extra time or extra cost--it is just a matter of emphasis and technique.

I'm not sure about it not taking extra time... My first few attempts at NB/T classes were with classes of about 10 students, and I had 6 hours of water time. I don't think I could do an adequate job given those constraints today...

These days, it is a maximum of three students to one pro, and 8 hours of pool time. That works pretty well for me.

 

[boulderjohn]

I'm not sure about it not taking extra time... My first few attempts at NB/T classes were with classes of about 10 students, and I had 6 hours of water time. I don't think I could do an adequate job given those constraints today...

These days, it is a maximum of three students to one pro, and 8 hours of pool time. That works pretty well for me.

In my experience, the class took about the same amount of time as doing it on the knees, regardless of the number of students. Some things take longer, but others are much shorter.

Here are a couple of comparisons regarding time:

• When students are horizontal, the regulator recovery skills are a piece of cake. With the sweep method, the regulator drops in front of the student as soon as the diver leans right (which is very different from leaning right while kneeling.) With the reach method, for a kneeling student, gravity pulls the tank down and away from the student, making it hard to reach, but with a horizontal student, the regulator is right behind the head, and the hose is easily reached. You zip through those skills.
• With mask removal and replacement, kneeling students often have trouble with the bubbles they exhale going up their face and into their nose. That makes it hard for some students. If they are horizontal, the bubbles slide by the cheek and are not even seen, let alone felt.
• When you get to the part that used to be the fin pivot, when students are supposed to be shown that breathing influences buoyancy, they have already done that. It only takes a few minutes to reach that goal, and in my mind, if you are teaching that was from the start, you should be allowed to skip it. Back when it was a fin pivot, that was typically by far the most time consuming part of the class.
• When you are in the last part of the confined water session, the students are by then so accustomed to neutral buoyancy that they can go through those skills quickly.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I'm not sure about it not taking extra time... My first few attempts at NB/T classes were with classes of about 10 students, and I had 6 hours of water time. I don't think I could do an adequate job given those constraints today...

These days, it is a maximum of three students to one pro, and 8 hours of pool time. That works pretty well for me.

OT: it bothers me that people insist on agency max ratios. Is this really in the best interest of the student? Sure I've taught 10 students at once NB/T, but I had two assistants with a GUE background, so.....

 

[JonnieB]

A quick look at the USA and the Asia-Pacific region.

1) USA

In the 3rd quarter of this year, the number of entry-level scuba diving certifications issued to Americans is down from last year (-4.8%) and down from pre-pandemic levels (-9.8%). So far, there is no “post-pandemic comeback” for the dive industry. Instead, we are simply “back on the declining slope” we were on before COVID-19.



2) Asia-Pacific

In Asia-Pacific, the situation is significantly more disastrous, with open-water certifications down 42.5% in the first 9 months of this year compared to pre-COVID levels.



What say you?

Without mainland Chinese divers traveling around SE Asia and getting certified (and stepping on and crashing into reefs) yes new diver certs will be down 40%+. Look on the brightside...the corals are thankful.

 

[JonnieB]

I know people going back to open-circuit from rebreathers and to recreational diving from technical diving. Or quitting outright.

Good for them...$400+ for a Helium fill is just whack!