I ended up diving with Dive Asia (my friend picked them). On the way to the boat we picked up divers from a few other hotels but from other dive shops as well. I am not sure if that means that those other dive shops used dive asia or not, but it seemed that way. Everything was adequate. The boat was fine, there was a fresh water rinse. Lunch was ok, there weren't a lot of snacks though. The fills were at first very short (2500 psi instead of 3000 psi) but they topped them off. The primary thing that I wasn't too happy with was the dive master. He didn't really have much regard for safety as I understand safety. Things he did that I didn't feel comfortable with
Our group was 3 divers and the DM.
1) Planned to send people to the surface by themselves as they ran out of air.
2) No buddy groups, just one big group. I tried to keep track of people but couldn't tell if someone left the group because they ran out of air or not.
3) He had a tendency to just swim ahead without looking at the group to make sure everyone was there and ok.
3) On our first dive the first diver (my buddy) went up because he ran out of air (he is an airpig, I will last for 45-50 minutes he is out of air in about 15 minutes). The third guy (loosely the DM's buddy) and I were following the DM and the DM just disappeared as we rounded the corner of the king fisher. We waited for him to come back but he never did. We tried looking for him and couldn't find him. After the dive he said that we didn't follow the plan (which we both thought that we had).
4) On the third dive we lost the guy that was loosely buddied with the dive master. The dive master was swimming ahead very quickly in strong current and I couldn't catch up to him to ask where the other guy went. After the dive my buddy and I both said we noticed when we lost the guy but the current was strong and we were struggling to keep up with the DM. The guy who got lost was very pissed off.
I tried very hard to keep track of my buddy and the dive master, but in the end I would have been much happier to not have the dive master at all. I prefer not to swim so fast and get a close look at things.
The only other boat experience I have is the MV spree at the flower gardens. That boat was very good and had really good procedures. This boat was good and the DM was poor.