FAQ
Our selection
How do you choose the dive centres, hotels and liveaboards featured on DivingDeal?
We don't list everything, and that's deliberate. A typical dive travel agency works with around 500 providers. Today we feature 3,783 dive centres, 5,130 dive hotels and 359 liveaboards, a much wider selection, but a curated one.
A word on our method: we pull the platforms' ratings (Google, Booking) and set a minimum threshold. The threshold is our call; the rating itself never is.
Dive centres
- Being on the coast. Inland centres, geared toward training rather than travel, don't appear on the site. You're here for a dive holiday, not a pool course.
- A minimum 4/5 Google rating, on an established listing. That's the voice of hundreds of divers who came before you.
- A website that actually shows the activity: trips, prices, supervision. Those with nothing to show don't make the list.
Dive hotels
- A minimum 4/5 Google rating, the same standard as for dive centres. For the rare hotels without a Google listing, a minimum 8/10 Booking rating.
- An official website, with one deliberate exception: some small family-run guesthouses, on a Polynesian atoll or a remote island, have no website and never will. They rent their rooms through booking platforms, and that's perfectly fine. We don't penalise authenticity just because it doesn't do marketing.
Liveaboards
Here, our logic changes, and we'd rather say so upfront. The global liveaboard market is narrow (a few hundred boats), and the pool of available reviews is much thinner than for dive centres or hotels. It's enough to rank boats against each other, not to exclude any. So we present the bookable offer as it stands, with whatever reviews exist for each boat, and leave the comparing to you: itineraries, seasons, required level, life on board. The day that review base is solid enough to set a minimum threshold, we will, and we'll write it here.
And after that?
The screening doesn't stop at the door. For dive centres and hotels, ratings and reviews are tracked over time: those that slip drop out of the catalogue.
What order are results shown in?
By statistical relevance, not by how long a listing has been around or by commission. A 5/5 rating from 2 reviews isn't information, it's a coincidence: it can't outrank a 4.8/5 built on 200 reviews. So we weight every rating by its number of reviews, starting from a deliberately cautious baseline: a lack of reviews never works in anyone's favour.
Are you paid by the providers you feature?
Yes, and it's our only business model: we earn a commission from providers when you book with them. Never from you: the price you pay is the same as booking direct. And never in exchange for a better ranking: no amount of money moves a business up our lists. A spot here can't be bought.
Who's behind DivingDeal?
A diver, not a financier. DivingDeal was created by Manuel Lewin, a dive instructor since 1994 (Rangiroa, Paris, Playa del Carmen), creator of the PlongExpo trade show and scuba-people.com. This site's selection criteria didn't come out of a spreadsheet.