@FunRecDiver
Thanks for posting what to me seems a perfectly fair and unbiased report about your experiences. I'd just like to add now that the exchange of viewpoints seems to be drawing to a close, that your recent experience and mine of a decade ago are almost identical.
I originally came to Thailand to try to find work teaching diving and after a few weeks in Phuket headed out to Ko Tao which I'd heard was a diving mecca. I stayed on the Island for two weeks, and due to my experiences during that time I've never been back. I didn't have my equipment broken, wasn't abused by any staff, and during the time I was there did nothing but fun dive.
What made my experience of the island so poor was exactly what you point out, the sell, sell, sell attitude of the dive center I dived with (one of the top centers on the island at the time and still going strong) and also the lack of experience of the Divemaster Trainees who ruined many of my dives.
In one instance we dived with a guide who got completely lost at Chumphon Pinnacle and never even found the dive site. We spent 15 minutes at a murky 20 meters as he followed his compass in a very wobbly line directly away from the site. We eventually surfaced after my buddy and I insisted on surfacing to get a baring, and found ourselves a long and trip ending surface swim back to the dive boats on the site.
It wasn't until we got back to the dive center that the management laughingly apologized to us by saying that it wasn't the guides fault as he was a Divemaster Trainee, had never dived the site before and he was following a compass direction that an experienced divemaster had given him. They did reluctantly agree not to charge us for that dive.
Although I think it is fair enough to use DMT's to guide dives once they have reached a high level of experience with a certified divemaster, and have good knowledge of the sites that they are guiding dives on, I strongly object to any dive center that misrepresents the qualifications of it's guides, and using ill experienced and improperly trained trainees to guide other unaware guests is a shameful practice and brings disrepute not only to Ko Tao but to the whole of Thailand.
As for the training standards, and I am generalizing here, the business model on the Island seems to be charge a lot less do a lot more, in other words "factory diving" seems a perfectly accurate description.
I've been working in different areas of Thailand since I've been here and for different dive centers with different operating styles, but the one constant seems to be that when you get a diver who tells you they have just completed their Open Water course in Ko Tao, the alarm bells start ringing. Not always but far too frequently, you don't guide them on a dive, you teach them how to dive. This is usually because they trained with a large group of students and didn't have any time for practicing dive skills they were taught, in other words, they should never have been certified to go out into Open Water.
This is something I witnessed personally while in Ko Tao, where the dive center I was staying at and diving with did their dive classes in public view. I was there in February, and the average group size for the Open Water courses I witnessed was 8-10 per instructor. This is inevitably very good for the dive center bank balance, and provided that the training is of an acceptable standard shouldn't be a problem for the students. Unfortunately it often isn't. As you pointed out, the instructors spent a huge amount of effort and time in trying to sell the students into doing the Advanced Course as soon as they had finished the Open Water. In the courses I've done, that mostly takes place during module 5 of the theoretical training, not hammered in every couple of minutes throughout the entire course.
Why do they do it? Possibly they get a commission, possibly because the instructor who sells an Advanced Course gets to teach it, or possibly (and maybe cynically on my part) they know that due to the training they will receive they will need to take the Advanced Course to be at even an Open Water level of dive skills.
Maybe you were at exactly the same dive center that I was, and maybe they are the only one in Ko Tao that use these business practices, maybe they actually have really good standards and practices and have only let them slip on the two occasions that you and I were there. Not very likely though is it.
As with the recent political turmoil in Bangkok, the general public don't discern between a warning about a specific area in Thailand and Thailand in general, we all get tarred with the same brush, so if bad practices continue anywhere in Thailand, it's in the entire Thailand Diving communities interest that it gets sorted out and that the bad reports can end. I'd love to be able to go back to Ko Tao and have a good dive experience, and I'm sure that there are dive centers on the Island that can provide it and who will get really "pissed" at this post as some did with yours. For that reason I would have liked to name the dive center where I had my experience, (and some of the ones who have sent out "trained" divers into the world that I've ended up trying to guide), but as 10 years have passed I have to hope that the dive center has changed for the positive.
Although I'm sure that there is abundant PADI bashing going on elsewhere in the forums, I'd have to question why PADI seems to be ignoring the situation in some of the dive centers in Koh Tao. PADI does have good training standards provided that they are taught properly, so I'm hoping that the huge amount of fees that the Island brings them through the factory training that goes on there isn't blinkering them to poor training standards which bring PADI's brand into disrepute and leads to the negative image of PADI training that seems to be cropping up everywhere nowadays.
I'm hoping that the decent dive centers in Koh Tao, don't have a knee jerk reaction to this post and get defensive about Koh Tao diving, if your reputation is being smudged by the activities of another dive center it's you who needs to do something about it, if anyone can improve the image and standards of the Island it's the people who operate there.
In the area where I am now based a dive center opened for business a few years ago and tried to operate with a similar business model. At the insistence of the other dive centers in the area, who for once got together to do something as a community, it was closed down for PADI violations after operating for a single season.
