Diving with hire equipment

Most of us learn to dive with hire equipment, we don't want to make such a large and expensive purchase as we are learning - that is entirely reasonable. As an instructor, I used to leave my personal equipment at home at times and use the store hire equipment so I had a taste of what the learners are experiencing. This was usually a lousy experience for me; a poorly fitting wetsuit, leaky mask, ill-fitting BCD, cheap fins and a poorly breathing regulator reminded me of the stress new divers experience.

I do not subscribe to the notion that it is easier to sell equipment to divers if they are faced with the prospect of lousy equipment for their entry level diver course. This is poor marketing, a variation of the good cop/bad cop routine that the average person sees straight through.

So what are the options for a slick dive operation? Not only does selling off hire equipment at the end of the season make good financial sense, it makes good marketing sense. The benefits include learner divers having the opportunity to purchase good quality second hand equipment, the dive centre rotates hire equipment annually maintaining the latest range of equipment they actually retail and equipment failure opportunities significantly reduce.

After the third season, hire equipment has no resale value so you are left with old equipment with no monetary value, increased maintenance costs, increased failure rates and a marketing disaster. Why learn to dive from a facility that pays such scant regard to dive equipment? What does this say about their dive operation? How can you charge premium prices for services, how do you justify your fees? If the equipment looks like this, is the instruction of similar value.

Now I understand a new dive centre does not have the capital for big investments, the alternatives are much worse however; old equipment and a poor reputation. The risk management protocols for rotating hire equipment; namely the regulator and buoyancy jacket carry a high degree of risk and need to be in exemplary condition. Likewise, people do not like to wear old, faded or ripped wetsuits and a number of dive operations I have worked at offer exactly that.