Yes, I was really surprised as reviews are great and Magnus from Bongo Bongo told me we made a good choice and to say hi to Paul (hope I remember the name correctly as we never met him during our 4 days of diving)
Let me elaborate since not everything was bad:
The girls at reception/dive booking were great! Always asking if we had good dives and good at explaining the on shore set up.
Watched the instructors doing both DSD, refresher and OW certification and from what we could hear/see they were great at explaining theory and what comes next/showing the exercises on land. I do think they were letting new divers a bit down by not helping them bring the equipment to the boat during low tide. (The crew carried our gear to the boat, and I found it challenging to walk on the dead corals to the boat, can’t imagine why you want new/not certified divers to do it with equipment!) At high tide would be ok to carry their own to learn how to get aboard with equipment.
The crew on the boat were also helpful with getting the equipment on and off.
But dive guides were unenthusiastic. On our first dives our guide never asked how much air we had left or if we were ok - I thought it might be because he saw we were dive professionals, so figured we would let him know, but when our friend (aowd) joined he never asked her either. He also only told my husband about a change in the dive plan (in the surface, just before descending) and only signalled “safety stop” to my husband as well - at 47 minutes of diving, while we still had more than 100 bar). Our friend commented and complained about him to the dive receptionist and we got assigned a new dive guide. Suddenly the dive briefings also changed to include: “your guide will ask for your air …”.
Our new dive guide was a bit better and very helpful towards my SIL (I asked him to, since she’s 65 years old with about 70 dives and only started diving at 56), he kept close watch on her buoyancy and air, helping her get weights and bcd off in the water. We also got 60 minute dives.
