“We don’t make any money on our open water classes. We hope that the open water students will buy equipment from us once they are certified.” I first heard this type of statement was during my PADI IDC when we were discussing course pricing. As a business person, this didn’t make much sense to me, but I could understand the rationale that a business uses a product or service to drive sales of other products or services. That was six years ago. I’ve had plenty of time to think about this and the more I ponder it, the more I have realized that this mentality is slowly killing the scuba diving industry. [Read more...]