The $99 scuba course question

[johnmckenzie]

Recently someone posted a photo on Facebook with text that read,"No one who offers $99 scuba courses does so because they want to create better divers."

I thought this was an important topic for an intelligent discussion. A founder of the one of the training agencies recently told me that he had research that showed a correlation between the advent of cheap weekend scuba courses and diver retention decline. Another multi-shop owner recently said that he is considering dropping his $99 courses.

What is your opinion?



Thank you

p.s. I also posted this in the Instructor forum because I would like to see how the answers differ between forums.

 

[pdhenry]

$99 = what? DSD? Scuba diver? OW?

 

[johnmckenzie]

Open water

 

[beanojones]

Most cheap courses end up being more expensive by the time everything is done, with separate fees for books, and rental, and PICs.

Cheaper courses are usually taught in places where the overhead is basically nil. The "pool" sessions are done right in the ocean, and run straight into the open water dives. The soft gear (masks, fins snorkel) are required to be purchased from the shop. Since that right there is $150-$350 dollars the shop makes its money on the student. The instrcutor largely has to be someone who is not doing this full time, but that's not different from most instructors in general.

With regards to price on training,

Most open water students in general treat getting certified as the end goal. Even more so, students who price shop on training are not planning on becoming divers, because certification is usually the very cheapest part by far about being a diver. (It should not be, but it is. Unfortunately the only people charging significantly more for OW tend to teach overly long self-aggrandizing courses, so the more expensive courses tend to get a bad name because the instructor is just ego teaching.)

If the students are trying to, or have to, spend as little as possible to get a license, they are certainly not going to spend any more to actually go diving, since they already achieved the goal.

From my own perspective, I see plenty of people teaching in the local/military market (usually active duty military or dependents) on this sort of price range. Since none of them are doing this for a living, they are not concerned about their effective hourly wage or gas/vehicle overhead, so the cost does not really affect what they do in the water, or the time they spend on things

I would say in general the average instructor thinks that longer courses means a better diver. What I have seen though is that as is true of most things, "work" expands to fill time with the longer course filled with more blather from the instructor instead of more time actually diving. So if the low course cost means the instrcutor has to be more efficient, then that is probably not necessarily going to result in worse students.

But of course once any instructor has their lifetime student counts they will move onto better paying jobs, so the cheap course will usually have the least experienced instrcutor in it, which adds the gross ineffeciency back in.

 

[Akimbo]

I think too many dive shops consider classes as a loss-leader to sell gear without regard for the student's best interest. The race to the bottom continues.

 

[RJP]

A founder of the one of the training agencies recently told me that he had research that showed a correlation between the advent of cheap weekend scuba courses and diver retention decline.

Then the advent of $99 courses also correlates with the global recession which also correlates with avg surface temperature of the earth and the number of "Likes" Kim Kardashian's butt has received on FB.

That said, the correlation - if any - probably has less to do with training quality and more to do with the fact that when you lower the cost of entry a greater proportion of the people entering will have relatively LOW interest in diving compared to someone who is willing to pay $500 for a course.

People with LOW interest in diving tend to not stick with diving... irrespective of price.

---------- Post added March 31st, 2015 at 08:42 PM ----------

p.s. I also posted this in the Instructor forum because I would like to see how the answers differ between forums.

Assume my answer above won't differ in the I-to-I forum.

 

[TSandM]

I'm quite sure that, if you graphed price of OW class against motivation to take up diving, you'd see that, as the price increases, the motivation has to increase.

I know that, when I went to sign up for an OW class, there was undoubtedly a price at which I was going to turn around and walk out of the shop and tell my husband to forget it. I'm not sure what that price would have been, but I'm sure there was one. I'm also sure that, if your ONLY vision of diving is that you are going to do a couple of dives on your honeymoon, that price is lower.

The $99 classes offered here aren't $99 classes; the $99 covers very little, and the students pay for a lot of things that are included in our shop's class, which is not $99. But they probably do end up cheaper than our classes, and are much quicker -- one day in the pool and one weekend in OW, as opposed to 6 pool sessions and 2 days of OW diving spread over two different weekends. I think we produce better prepared divers, but I have no data to confirm that. I know which class I'd rather take, and I have DM'd one class for the $99 shop and will never do it again.

 

[ams511]

I was certified with a $99 course back in 1991, as someone else mentioned once you add the extras it was more like $250. However, adjusting for inflation $99 dollars today would be less than $60 then. I can't say the course was bad, it was several weeks long, but there was the hard sell to purchase equipment. Any researcher will tell you that correlation does not imply causality, so I would take what the dive agency founder said with a grain of salt. RJP makes a reasonable explanation as to the increased drop out rate.

I seen a rush of $99 courses in Miami a few years back being offered through Groupon, then they sort of tapered off. There was an article I read around the same time how Groupon basically attracts people whose primary concern is price. I would love to see their faces and the salesman's when he tries to sell them several thousand dollars of equipment. There are several humorous threads by Groupon divers posted here.

The photo is correct that shops offering this pricing are not trying to train the best divers. However, how much would it cost to properly train and outfit with new equipment the family of five in the photo? Probably close to $10,000. Not many families have that kind of money to spend on a hobby.

 

[Nemrod]

I think my first SCUBA course was like $30 and I had to have a YMCA membership for the pool. But it was a six (or was it eight, I forget at the moment) week course meeting two times per week from about 7 until 10. It was usually about an hour lecture and then the remainder in the pool.

N

 

[ams511]

What is your opinion?

View attachment 205673

The woman in the photo is trained so well she doesn't even need a regulator.