warning
By Erik

A Warning Regarding Wanderable

Greetings fellow divers and lovers of the underwater world!  Today we task ourselves with bringing you news of a potential serious red flag. This one goes out to all of our potential guests who are planning their weddings and honeymoon in Playa del Carmen and the Riviera Maya.

A couple of years ago, we signed up with an online company that goes by the name of Wanderable (not going to give them the benefit of a link).  This company is an online wedding registry where couples choose activities the want to do during their honeymoon and their friends and family can purchase said activities for them.

Seems like a pretty cool thing, right?  Well, there are many other sites like that one (honeyfund, honeymoonwishes, travelersjoy, among others).  We were invited to be a part of this wonderable site when it first launched about 3 years or so ago.

At first, things were very smooth with them.  People would list a gift certificate for whichever activity (we had Discover Scuba Diving, Cozumel Direct Trip and Cenote trip), their loved ones would buy it for them, and we would get an email to tell us “John Doe and Jane Smith were gifted X, Y or Z activity – gift certificate code blah blah bah), then the couple would get in touch with us, we would confirm dates with the couple, and we would get paid by wonderable.

Suddenly this all changed. Folks would get girft certificates, and we would not be informed by the company, nor would their certificates sometimes appear on our “sales orders”.  Then the payments stopped coming.  A couple of times we honored the reservations, and had to wait weeks to get paid, they wouldn’t reply to emails or answer phone calls,  so eventually, we stopped honoring the gift certificates bought through this company, and we asked them to take Beyond Diving – Riviera Maya off their website and off their vendor list.

Fast forward several months….  We receive an email from a nice gentleman who has unfortunately fallen prey to these unscrupulous people. Him and his future wife were gifted  a local Playa del Carmen 2 tank dive trip, which we told them that we could not honor, but would still love to have them as our guests.  Fortunately, they decided they still wish to dive with us, and all is good.

However, they will have to fight it out with wanderable to try to get their money back.

I was just checking out wanderable’s facebook page, and it hasn’t even been updated since July 2015, so that alone should raise all sorts of red flags.  Not to mention the comments left by couples who cannot get in touch with them.

Wanderable Facebook Wanderable

I have emailed wanderable yet again demanding that our company be taken off their site, so we will see how that plays out.  Since Beyond Diving – Riviera Maya is a registered trademark, any unauthorized use of our name constitutes a violation of international trademark laws.

So our suggestion to anybody thinking of using wanderable, is to not use it.  I am sure that our company is not the only one that has stopped honoring their gift certificates, so  I would recommend that you contact the companies directly from which you want to purchase an activity and do so directly.  That way you can be assured that your reservations will be honored and you will save yourselves the hassle of a potentially cancelled reservation due to non-payment.

 

 

Diving Travel
Scuba Diving lessons
By Erik

Should I do a refresher course?

When should I do a scuba refresher course?

 

This is a question we are often asked.  We recommend that people who have not been diving in more than one year do a refresher course. Of course, this all depends on the experience of the diver. Someone who has been diving for several years, and has hundreds or thousands of dives, but has a lapse of a year in diving wouldn’t necessarily need to do a refresher (unless they wanted to). However, someone with just a few dives, and more than a year of not diving, might benefit from it.

padi open waterdiver

In fact, we recently had a gentleman who came to the shop and wanted to go to the cenotes for some cavern diving.  He said he was certified open water diver since the mid 1980’s, when we asked him when his last set of dives had been, he dropped a bomb on us…   For someone who has not been diving in over 20 years, a simple refresher course would not do the trick.   Unfortunately, certification cards do not require you to do a certain number of dives per year.  Once you are certified, it is good for life. However, we said to this gentleman that we could not take him out to the cenotes without doing a thorough refresher course and evaluation (and a couple of shallow open water dives in our local Playa del Carmen reefs),  and that in fact, after a 22 year absence from scuba diving, we would recommend redoing the entire open water diver course.

He was quite offended, said that XYZ shop had told him they would take him, and that in fact their price was WAY cheaper than ours,  and stormed out of the shop.  The following day, we were leading a group in one of the cenotes and we came across this gentleman with a group from XYZ shop. After seeing him in the water, we were all quite relieved that he was not diving with us (especially after witnessing his panic attack within the first 3 minutes of the dive because of his absolute lack of understanding of buoyancy control or equipment function). After speaking with the guide for XYZ shop, he said that he was aware that this person had not been diving in several years, but did not know how many as the owner of the shop had not given him any more information other than “he hasn’t been diving in a few years, so watch him”.

On the other hand, we have had people who insist in doing a refresher course even though they may not necessarily need to do it, but they just want to get comfortable in the controlled conditions of the pool prior to going to the open water.  We always welcome that, and we are grateful for people who are proactive and take a hands on approach to their safety when scuba diving.

PAdi Courses PLaya del Carmen

 

So this wasn’t meant to sound like we were preaching or like we were trying to put ourselves above everybody else.  It is just a reminder that just like everything else in life, skills are forgotten when we don’t use them in a while.  Scuba diving is not like riding a bicycle.  The consequences of a poorly executed dive can be disastrous.  So much has changed over the last 20 years in terms of equipment and knowledge of decompression theory…

Even if a refresher “course” is not needed for you, we always recommend starting out shallow and easy on your first couple of dives after an extended dry period.   There is always time to do something a little more challenging.

 

For more information on our courses or dive trips click the links below:

 

Scuba Diving Courses in Playa del Carmen

 

Scuba Diving in Playa del Carmen and Riviera Maya

Diving