We dived 17 times with Absolute Scuba at the end ...
We dived 17 times with Absolute Scuba at the end of August 2013.
All in all it was quite different from what we expected from reading
other reviews and we were very disappointed.
Our points of criticism are:
* misleading terms of the dive package (e.g. is the night dive included?
when exactly is lunch applicable? - in fact ist wasn´t unless you had three dives a day... but that wasn´t mentioned before)
* no briefing in the base e.g. with a schematic map, just a quick one on
the boat and that was often done quite sloppy (´We go down and swim
around.´)
* guide often touched the corals with bare hands and teased marine
animals until we told him to stop
* no fish signs when pointing out interesting creatures under water
* guides some times seemed disoriented under water, which irritated us,
because it was unclear, what is going on (Are we waiting for something?
Is there a problem? Why are we swimming so fast and slow down suddenly? What´s the reason to swimm right against the current?)
* guides didn`t seemed to be interested to show us many things under
water but rather swam by them
* bad planning of dives (e.g. swimming with the current in the beginning
and against the current in the end of a dive, missing tools to adjust
tank valve, aborting dive if any of the group is below 50 bar, which is rather annoying, if a group is not built by checking each persons skills and/ or air consumption, so a dive can take only 35 min while there is more than 120 bar left in your tank)
* bad communication between hotel management and dive instructors (e.g.
about the distribution of multiple dives)
* unreliable organisation (e.g. at first agree to handing out 15l tanks to some divers
but shortly after the dive it suddenly wasn´t possible any more; if you don´t keep on asking ´what´s the plan for todays-divesites´ you won´t know where you´re going to unless you have arived at the divespot in the worst case; strange enough they combine the first dive at a distant divesite with a secons one more close by, because you always have to pay the highest extra fee.... instead of diving twice at a divesite for $30 extra and planing two dives at the other location for $20 extra another day)
* no debriefing after the dive - in fact everybody disappears rather quick after arriving at the diveshop
* we´ve been told it takes only half a day to dry all your equipment as they couldn´t arrange a night dive earlier
Most of our dives we had with Eka and the others with Indra (who is
really a great guy and it was fun diving with him because we seemed to
know what he was doing, so most of our concerns do not apply to him).
We tried to talk with Eka directly to address our issues, but he ignored
most of them. After we had a feedback talk with the hotel management he
ignored us completely.
Our solution was to get out of the dive package as quickly as possible
and look for another dive base. Luckily Waterworx is the direct
neighbour to Absolute Scuba!
They really saved our holiday because diving with Absolute Scuba was
neither relaxing nor enjoyable most of the time.
So we clearly recommend to go to Waterworx or try an other dive base
instead.
The hotel connected to Absolute Scuba, Padang Bai Beach Resort, is quite
nice though.
All in all it was quite different from what we expected from reading
other reviews and we were very disappointed.
Our points of criticism are:
* misleading terms of the dive package (e.g. is the night dive included?
when exactly is lunch applicable? - in fact ist wasn´t unless you had three dives a day... but that wasn´t mentioned before)
* no briefing in the base e.g. with a schematic map, just a quick one on
the boat and that was often done quite sloppy (´We go down and swim
around.´)
* guide often touched the corals with bare hands and teased marine
animals until we told him to stop
* no fish signs when pointing out interesting creatures under water
* guides some times seemed disoriented under water, which irritated us,
because it was unclear, what is going on (Are we waiting for something?
Is there a problem? Why are we swimming so fast and slow down suddenly? What´s the reason to swimm right against the current?)
* guides didn`t seemed to be interested to show us many things under
water but rather swam by them
* bad planning of dives (e.g. swimming with the current in the beginning
and against the current in the end of a dive, missing tools to adjust
tank valve, aborting dive if any of the group is below 50 bar, which is rather annoying, if a group is not built by checking each persons skills and/ or air consumption, so a dive can take only 35 min while there is more than 120 bar left in your tank)
* bad communication between hotel management and dive instructors (e.g.
about the distribution of multiple dives)
* unreliable organisation (e.g. at first agree to handing out 15l tanks to some divers
but shortly after the dive it suddenly wasn´t possible any more; if you don´t keep on asking ´what´s the plan for todays-divesites´ you won´t know where you´re going to unless you have arived at the divespot in the worst case; strange enough they combine the first dive at a distant divesite with a secons one more close by, because you always have to pay the highest extra fee.... instead of diving twice at a divesite for $30 extra and planing two dives at the other location for $20 extra another day)
* no debriefing after the dive - in fact everybody disappears rather quick after arriving at the diveshop
* we´ve been told it takes only half a day to dry all your equipment as they couldn´t arrange a night dive earlier
Most of our dives we had with Eka and the others with Indra (who is
really a great guy and it was fun diving with him because we seemed to
know what he was doing, so most of our concerns do not apply to him).
We tried to talk with Eka directly to address our issues, but he ignored
most of them. After we had a feedback talk with the hotel management he
ignored us completely.
Our solution was to get out of the dive package as quickly as possible
and look for another dive base. Luckily Waterworx is the direct
neighbour to Absolute Scuba!
They really saved our holiday because diving with Absolute Scuba was
neither relaxing nor enjoyable most of the time.
So we clearly recommend to go to Waterworx or try an other dive base
instead.
The hotel connected to Absolute Scuba, Padang Bai Beach Resort, is quite
nice though.