Comments on: Koh Tao: Diver’s Paradise or Overworked Money Making Machine?

By: BobbieNL

BobbieNL — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 03:04:36 +0000

I dont really agree on the negative commends on the quality of the dive schools. I’m an SSI diver myself and got in contact with one of the SSI schools on the island. They are doing a great job and it’s not very much different than diving at Bonaire as far as I noticed during my dives. Small groups and enough instructors. So I just wanted to say not all dive schools are the same at Koh Tao, there are some good quality and friendly dive schools….

As far as the “getting around”, when you hire a scooter or quad be careful!! I’ve seen many people ending up paying for damage to the scooter or quad they didn’t create them selves! So write down all scratches and maybe even take pictures, because you will for sure end up paying for it!!

By: salva

salva — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:45:12 +0000

Hi,
Very nice article as i am planning on getting there this summer as a first trip to check the island and the conditions, my final thought would be to move there and do a fresh start. I am an instructor trained between Spain and Malta and i would like to know if you think there are possibilities to find a job over there and more or less what are the prices they paid?

Thanks a lot and keep writing!

By: Cam

Cam — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:28:53 +0000

Interesting article. I own a dive shop on an island in south west Thailand in the Andaman Sea, and we regularly get divers travelling here who have dived, or have been certified on koh Tao.

On the whole, we are aware of the reputation that Koh Tao has for diver training, and I often ask newly qualified divers from Koh Tao about their experiences there, and most are positive and complimentary (sure, most newly qualified divers don’t know if their instructor stuck to standards or not ) – it’s not often that we hear of teaching groups larger than 4 or 6 students and it would appear that most instructors cover all of the required skills (perhaps with a little shuffling about between dives as you mention) and stick to depth limits. In our experience, most newly qualified divers (most, though not all) we see from Koh Tao are reasonably competant and seem well trained – they know their way around the equipment, can remeber BWRAF and have reasonable bouyancy.

I am tempted to say ‘you get what you pay for’, in that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys (Koh Tao must be one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified), but I know several very hard working dive professionals on Koh Tao who do their very best every day to produce good divers, get paid a pittance and love their jobs.

One of the things about Koh Tao is the sheer number of student divers passing through every year. If, for example, a dive shop trains 100 divers and 3 of them turn out to be at the lower end of ‘acheiving mastery’, then remember that Koh Tao can churn out 1,000′s of divers a week during peak season, and for every 1,000 divers, there will be 30 ‘poor’ divers – it’s all about the numbers…

So, on the whole, while I would obviously prefer to see the trainee divers in my dive shop in the Andaman Sea (where the diversity and amount of marine life, corals and fish are greater…!) rather than on Koh Tao, if you are on a tight budget and don’t mind the possibility of being part of a diving factory then why not head to the Gulf of Thailand and get your PADI? you won’t regret it…