Check Your Dive School!

Diving is a safe sport. It owes it's enviable safety record to the professionalism of its instructors, and to rigorous safety protocols, which ensure that recreational diving is kept within safe limits, making it accessible to all.

Diving is one of the few (the only?) sports where you are required to use a mechanical piece of apparatus to sustain one of your basic life functions (breathing!). Don't you owe it to yourself to get the best possible tuition in it's use, even if that expert tuition might cost a few pounds more?

Whether you're just about to "take the plunge" with PADI and start diving, or are looking to advance up the PADI ladder, make sure you choose a registered PADI diving school.

PADI group dive schools into different categories, just like they group their instructors. These listings will be the subject of a separate post.

If you're starting to wonder how to find your nearest PADI-approved dive school: PADI make it easy! The PADI Dive Centre Finder plots all dive centres onto a Google Maps map, which you can easily search for your home town. The dive centres are then shown on the map, together with their category.

By the way: if you've had a bad experience with a dive centre or instructor, don't keep it to yourself: PADI's Quality Management people want to know! (they also collect positive feedback, so channel that their way too)

PADI issue Customer Alerts to safeguard you against rouge traders and poor quality teaching. PADI advise that you be pro-active and check out a dive school or instructor before signing up. Instructors and Dive Centres won't mind you asking for their numbers (PADI Divemasters / Assistant Instructors and Instructors all have PADI Pro Numbers, and Dive Centres have a Centre Number).

Make contact with PADI and double-check, then you can get on with the diving, safe in the knowledge you are being well looked after.