Banned from Pro Dive

[Butch103]

Rick Murchison once bubbled...

Where? What's the name of the club? If you can collect $25/month from 250 folks for a club, I want to model that!
Rick

I too would love the specifics of this club.

I have begun my DM training with my LDS (similar to Mike F ...He won't use a DM he hasn't trained himself)...This owner is a new owner and I would love to help him build his business......

 

[GQMedic]

I'm just miffed that there was an argument in a thread and I wasn't invited. I'm so jaded! Maybe I'll quit smoking so I can piss everyone off in "smoking divers revisited".


-Dennis
kicking my own hat around in the cold waters of so Cal.

 

[ZoCrowes255]

Coogeeman once bubbled...
I was asked by a friend of mine if I would take him through his Divemaster couse privately. It wasn't a money issue, but we dived all the time and he really wanted to do it with me. I had taken him through OW, AOW and a number of speciality courses over the years.

I spoke to him about it and we decided that due to the nature of the course he would be better going through one of the local shops. No problem.

So, and I live to regret it, I pointed him to one store where I knew the instructor by reputation and knew that if she was teaching the course he would have a good time.

The owner of the store is another story and this is where it got nasty. On his first day he was approached by the owner and asked if he was thinking of buying anything new. He dived with predominantly Mares gear and she didn't sell Mares only Aqualung/US Divers gear. He said that he was going to buy a new reg set and had set his heart on the Mares Ruby. She turned around and said that no one at Pro Dive uses Mares and that if he wanted to do the course with them and work for them as a Divemaster he would have to buy Aqualung.

Adding insult to injury she then said that if he bought the Mares reg she would call Pro Dive head office and have him blacklisted from working anywhere in Australia. I wish that he had called me when this happened but he didn't and not knowing what to do he bought the reg set that she was pushing.

On a happy note he completed the course and is now a certified Divemaster.

Well I'm glad to see that he completed his Divemaster course at least!

That's a very common (and reasonable) request but the store owner went around it the wrong way. We have had a few Divemasters who have used equipment that we did not sell and the owner politely asked them to use one of our lines around our students. If they did not want to purchase it they could borrow one of the staff's backups or a rental during the times they are around students. It seems like this shop owner doesn't have any concept of how to approach the subject with tact.

Now that I am home I can add more: The shop I work for does not market Divemaster and Instructor Courses. For the most part all those trained will be used by the dive shop so it's mainly people who want to work for us who are in our courses. And before they even start a Divemaster course they usually go through an apprenticeship which is usually just tagging along with Openwater Classes and helping out when necessary.

 

[Diver0001]

Rick Murchison once bubbled...

Where? What's the name of the club? If you can collect $25/month from 250 folks for a club, I want to model that!
Rick

Oops. That should have read 25 Dutch guilders. ABout 10 bucks. It's just enough to keep coming back to the store for gear (the 10% discount) and to the club for training.

And as I said before it's loosely organised. We keep a mailing list and a few of the DM's organise the "discover local diving" days. We call it "guided diving". All we do is plan it on a calendar that we put up on the internet and fire off an email/newsletter to let people know what the agenda is for the coming month or so. People can sign up on the internet but a lot come without signing up first. On the day of the dive we have a fixed time for everyone to show up at the shop. We actually never know who's coming until an hour before we leave but the average turn out is somewhere around 20. 30 happens occasionally. Apart from the DM's who lead the dives, one usually stays topside to help get people ready and to check them in/out (sometimes you'll snorkel around to keep pushing the beginners back down again ) and the rest go with the groups. Some people also just show up becasue they're looking for a buddy so it happens that people will go without direct supervision and they'll just check in/out with the DM on the surface.

Just to give you an idea of what it's like for the coming weeks :

27 may and 1 june Nitrox specialty,

8-9 june we're doing Advanced and a Drift specialty, as well as guided diving during the day and guided night diving.

On the 14th & 22nd is the Search and Recovery specialty

On the 12, 15th & 22nd it's the Deep specialty

On the 15th & 29th of June it's guided boat diving (good for those who are getting ready for vacations )

and on the weekend of the 20th of June there's a whole whack of people going to do guided diving in Belguim for a change of scenary.

And that's not to mention the OW courses that start every other week or so.

It's gotten to the point that if you book it they will come.... It'll be like this until October, when the watre temperatures plummet to around freezing and then you'll only see the die hards through the winter. In the winter we usually do a lot of introduction dives in the pool. We have some connectoins with sport clubs at local schools/colleges and they come by the bus load to take into-dives during the winter. In the spring we often see them back again for OW. A few brave souls can't wait that long and take a slightly longer OW course in drysuit during the winter. You have to respect people who will go through OW when the water is so cold that putting your head under hurts like someone driving a nail in your forehead.

We also arrange group trips farther afield. The last few were Mexico, The Red Sea and The Philippines (I think I forgot one). I'm not sure what's up for this year but some of the DM's were talking about going to Spain before long. We also have good connections in Lanzarotte (sp?) and it wouldn't surpise me if we send a trip to the Canary Islands this year too. We also do wreck diving on teh North Sea with the more advanced divers but we make use of charter run by some local tech-divers for this. They come and give a presentation for the uninitiated and they usually manage to sign up 10 or so. Their boat can service something like 60 divers so we're only 1 delegatoin among the many. The North Sea trips usually go something like 18 hours.

R..

 

[MikeFerrara]

Diver0001 once bubbled...


Why is that? How do you compensate your assistants?

Do you have a club? It's easy to have a club. Ours has about 250 members, loosely organised and all recruited from courses. They all pay $25 a month and what they get in return is 10% discount on equipment and "discover local diving" for free. Each year some more come and some leave so the numbers are pretty stable. The DM's work on a volunteer basis with minimal compensation. The compensation amounts in real terms to nevre having to pay for air again plus a couple of hundred bucks in free equipment per year and additional training (specialties) for cost price.... and of course the opportunity to participate in team training and get some experience without having to make a formal commitment. For most of us it's still a hobby.

IN our case it's really win win. The store has a fairly big active club with enough instructors and DM's to manage about 300 certs a year, the club has all the facilities that the store has to offer, like the compressor, pool time, rental gear and somewhere to meet and give the training and the students get a small discount on gear and more or less free DM supervision until they're comfortable enough to go it alone.

And the store manages about 200K in net profit per year. Maybe we're lucky that there isn't too much competition and a diver base of about 15,000 PADI and about 35,000 CMAS divers all within about 100km radius and about 10+% growth in the market each year.

R..

There aren't 15,000 divers in my state let alone in my area and we don't issue anywhere near 300 certs per year. Our best year was a little over 100 but that was total certs not just OW. I started a club here once but that's a story for another time. LOL

 

[Genesis]

Requiring someone to wear specific gear to be a "pro" representing a shop is a legal, reasonable request, as you are promoting the shop's brands. Done all the time.

Requiring the same thing to take a class is another matter. While legal, it smacks of an improper tying arrangement in that the product tied has no rational relationship to the service purchased.

Its also unseemly, and a good reason to publically boycott the shop involved irrespective of the legalities of the practice in that particular jurisdiction.

 

[domino22]

Northeastwrecks once bubbled...


What an incredible crock. You armchair lawyers are laughable.

LDS' are private businesses. They have no obligation to serve you and you have no right to demand service.

You are, of course, free to walk away and watch them go out of business. But that's it.

You can be refused for any reason that is not related to unlawful discrimination.

I'd love to see someone take my LDS to court. By the time it finished, the plaintiff and his/her attorney would be paying for my next set of doubles and a couple of trips out of their own pockets.

Even better, the LDS still wouldn't need to serve them.

but why did the diveshop take my money let me get thru 2 hours of the class and then find out I bought gear on line and stopped the class right then and there and gave me my money back and read me the riot act about loyalty and supporting the local LDS and telling me I care more about money than service etc.etc. Well if she would have told me all of this UP FRONT before she took my money I would have said fine and went someplace else, What she did was very very wrong period.

 

[Genesis]

(moved by me )

 

[Scubaroo]

domino22/Genesis,

Do you two have your threads mixed up? This thread was about a diver being banned from a store in Australia (Pro Dive) over gear selection choices, not the nitrox course issue in Texas. Do you want the nitrox-issue related posts moved to the nitrox thread?

 

[dugandiving]

Just to set the record straight. No one removed my posts, I had them removed because they were juvenile and unnecessary. I became angry at someone using bullying tactics. I don't doubt that the gentleman concerned is ethical and competent. However, as I should have said at the time, there is a difference between the legalities of a situation, and the moral correctness of that same situation. I was interested in the rights and wrongs, not the technicalities. I am not a lawyer, or a solicitor as they are known in Australia, just a mere retired teacher. My initial crack at the fellow about the ethics of the American lawyer (please note the upper case A) came across as far more nasty than I really intended. However, what set me off, right or wrong, was the schoolyard bully routine, as to how dare I say anything with only having made 13 postings, and I wasn't going to win if I tried to start a contest on the board. Personally I have nothing against Americans, or anyone else for that matter, or lawyers. However, I have to give the fellow the benefit of the doubt, and see him as answering what he saw as my nastiness, with his own.