The Economics of Group Scuba, Posted to rec.scuba.locations and sci.econ There are several aspects to travel/dive trips. DIVE SHOPS A dive shop operator has a relativel high capital expense in boats, tanks and gear. So they are usually willing to give either a discount or free diving to people who bring them business that they would otherwise miss. One "extra" diver on a trip does not cost them anything extra. This is the case unless their boat is typically already loaded to capacity at that time of year. And the particular situation is probably also very "individual", so my experience may not generalize to other people. During my first two "group scuba trips" all the diving was "free" for everyone. To review: >But my first diving experiences were quite different, starting with >the Virgin Island Ecological Research Station at the site of the >Navy Tektite project. My later trips, while teaching Oceanography >at a small college, were to the west coast of St. Croix with groups >of students. VIERS provided tanks, an air compressor, and a small motor skiff, all included with "room and food" for a cost of $10 per day per student. As the faculity member in charge, even that cost was waived for me. We filled the tanks and did all the diving we wanted. Some students were gathering information for a report on the growth of corals on some freshly placed rocks, forming an artificial reef. Other just dove for pleasure. When I could no longer go to VIERS because Woods Hole (on Cape Cod, MA) took over the entire space for their students, I was advised by the director of VIERS to try Northside Valley on St. Croix. Possibly because Bill Walker, one of the founders of VI DIVERS, was then dating one of Nita Brown's many beautiful daughters, Bill invited me to bring the students over to his place for a dive on my first day in St Criox. I think he gave us all a discount, but he offered free diving to me every time I brought groups to VI DIVERS. While most of our diving was from the shore, I did take students who wanted boat dives over to C'sted to dive with VI DIVERS many times during the next several trips. In the mean time, The little dive shop call "Above and Below" in F'sted changed owners, got two boats, and became CRUZAN DIVERS. (Before that, they just rented gear and filled tanks). Tom Long, the new owner, made me the same deal: dive there and it is free for me. This is when I discovered that the west end of St. Croix has generally better diving than the east side (except for Buck Island, where the National Park service has flip flopped back and forth over permitting scuba.) So I went to VI DIVERS less often. CRUZAN DIVERS benefitted from this situation in another way also. When I had a large group in the mid-1980's, I wanted to dive the north shore off Gentle Winds, but no one at CRUZAN DIVERS knew where that was. So I guided their dive boat to it (a relatively short trip north around Hams's Bluff and past Cane Bay). It is one of the best dives on the island when the weather is calm, and CRUZAN DIVERS has done trips there ever since. (I had done that dive with VI DIVERS several times, but it is closer to CRUZAN DIVERS than to IV DIVERS). And at the same time, Michell Pugh(sp?) who I knew as a diving instructor at VI DIVERS, decided to start her own dive shop at Salt River. She called it DIVE EXPERIENCE, Salt River is an excellent dive area, and she made me the same deal as Tom Long and Bill Walker. Thus for the "glory years" of the 1980's, I had free diving just about anywhere on the island. My school (Milton College) went broke, but I continued to organize trips to St. Croix, composed largely of former Milton students who had been on previous trips, UW students, and some people who just came because they had heard about the trips. Some were divers, some were not. Some did "resort courses". Read my page. But things slowly changed. The former students moved or got married, or into jobs with little vacation time. DIVE EXPERIENCE moved to C'Sted, Bill Walker left VI DIVERS. Then Hurricane Hugo disrupted the island. After Hugo, I could not get into Northside Valley because the construction workers repairing the damage were staying there, and paying a lot more than my groups ever did. But there were still 6 who wanted to go to St. Croix, so I arrainged a trip and we stayed at Spratt Hall (also a good location on the west side.) More on that later. To conclude the Dive aspect: most shops will give free diving to anyone who organizes a trip. If you think it is worth it, do it. Many require you to have 10 people to dive free, but that will vary. And if they know YOU, and consider that having YOU on the dive will make it easier for them, (because you know the dive site and can be the guide for some of the divers), or if they are having a hard time filling their boat, they may waive this limit (as has happened to me). So a Question for the economists: Is this an case of "use other people's trip to finance YOUR trip"? AIR FARES On my early trips, the college covered my air fare (I was teaching a class ;-) After the school closed, there was a time when I got a discount on plane tickets when I bought them for a group. If there were 10, mine was free. The others paid the "book" price. But more recently the entire airplane ticket situation has changed. Since on recent trips, different people go at different times and from different places, I have had each person arrainge their own flights. I now use http://www.travelocity.com and recommend it to others. I get no commission from them. TRANSPORTATION & the Spratt Hall Trip. Another aspect of a dive trip is transportation around the island. At VIERS there was really no place to go, so this was not a factor. Students who wanted to go into town (Cruze Bay) to watch the super bowl left camp early in the morning and walked through miles of jungle to centerline road, and then to town. On St. Croix the first ten to twelve trips, I hired a van or station wagon from a local guy named Johnny, who also served as driver. He knew the island well and I learned of many interesting but out of the way places. Also, I got the van for about the price of a car rental: $250 a week, which was split up between everyone else in the group except me. After Hugo, Johnny changed phone numbers, and retired. So for the next trip (the Spratt Hall Trip) I lined up a van from another local, There were 6, and since the rental was not an especially good deal, we agreed to split the cost "equally", without any discussion of exactly what that term meant. As it turned out, there were 3 different ideas of what it meant. I (and some others) had assumed that each person would pay the same "per person day". The longer you were there, the greather your share of the bill. But (recall that some people were there longer than others) some thought that everyone should pay the SAME total amount; Rental/6 no matter how many days they were there. This theory was favored by those who were there the longest. But the counter theory was that each day should be billed separately. Those who were there only during the time when everyone else was, should pay less per day than those who were there for the same number of days, but before of after some others came (or left). If you were there only during the "middle of the trip" your daily cost chould be less than if you "came early" or "stayed late". After much discussion (often heated) the "per person day" theory was accepted, more because it was a compromise than because the two groups saw its merits. Obviously the "separate daily bill" would discourage anyone on future trips from arriving early, getting the van, and picking the others up at the airport: a significant cost saving since the taxi fare from the airport is almost as much as the daily car rental. As a result of that experience, I just included the (estimated) car/van cost in the daily trip price. Depending on just how many people, sometimes I come out ahead, sometimes behind. There is an non-linear relationship. Four people can fit in one car, (and I win), but if there are 5, a mini-van is required (and I lose). At 6, I am back to even, but 7 requires a big van and I lose again until there are about 9. If 10 to 15 people were to come, I would be ahead on the van rental AND could dive for free. That happened last in 1987. (and I don't take more than 15 since that fills the largest van). "I win" here means I pay less than the others. "I lose" means I pay more. Win some. lose some. The most recent trip had 6 people, 3 of them divers. Just enough to have dive buddies. Last year there was only one other diver interested, and I figured that if one of us was not up to diving, it would not be fair for the other. When there were just 3 divers, there were often just two ready to do a given dive. That seems to be the lower limit for a trip. NOTE TO THE ECONOMISTS: diving is considered unsafe unless done in pairs or small groups. For any given dive, 2 is enough, but for a several day trip I think 3 is the minimum since not everyone wants to do every dive. This becomes an important limit when diving the west coast of St. Croix since it is a little known area, and there are frequently no other divers except the ones that came with me. HOTELS For St. Croix, for me only the west side is considered. Northside Valley was both less expensive and generally better suited for diving than Spratt Hall, the only alternative, except for staying in F'stead. By staying in town and doing boat dives every day, you could get by without a car. But this is just my idea of a dive trip. People who do want that have many options, and F'sted is where I would recommend to anyone who wanted to do a lot of boat dives and eat out every night. There are several nice places to eat there. Not nearly as many as in C'sted, but the diving is so much better on the west coast. As with the dive shops, many hotels will give a discount to trip organizers, depending on their situation. Northside valley does (but it is not exactly a "hotel"). I stay there free. IS THIS SPAM? SO, is my post asking that anyone interested in a dive trip to St. Croix to look at my web page commercial SPAM, or is it within the accepted news group policy for rec.scuba.location (for information about diving locations), and is this post suitable for sci.econ? AND jim blair said... >Well those are lower prices than I expected. And I have never been to >Cozumel. And I may try it someday. BUT... Yeah I know... you want to bring people to your house in VI :) Been advertising it here for years!! >When I asked him about Cozumel, he indicated that the diving and the >overall experience is very different from St. Croix. Much more crowded >dive sites. When we dive most St. Croix sites, we are the only ones Then he selected the wrong dive operator.... many will move to another site if the selected one has too many boats. All the reefs are in effect in a long line up the coast.... so one can just move to an adjacent one. REPLY: jeb, on the comparison between cozumel & STX there, except sometimes we see other divers at Cane Bay. Also the currents are much stronger than he was used to in STX. >Naturally... it is drift (current diving) so unlike STX you do not have to >return whence you came.... he should have been going with the flow ;) Hi, I have done drift diving at Cancun. It is just that neither Kieth nor I like it as well. Can't stop and take a good look at the items of interest. But another difference is where we stay. The Cozumel links advertised hotel rooms, and in the city. In STX we stay in houses on a wooded >San Miguel a city? :) Well, that is what Kieth said. And there, like here, you can eat for a week for the price of one or two meals out. I have bought fresh tuna for $5.00 a pound (cleaned) and grilled it for dinner, flavored with wild thyme leaves that I picked near the house. >Well at Tacos La Mission 6 of us ate supper with two beers each for $35.... >not much more than self preparation I would say? There are two differen kinds of restaurants in St. Croix. The tourist oriented ones are rather pricy by Madison standards. But even the ones where the locals eat (my favorites) are more expensive than that. Typically, a counch dinner is about $10 at Villa Morales. >You can stay in Villas in or out of town and prepare locally purchased food >in Cozumel too. >That is not my interest because I am on holiday and I enjoy exploring >different eating establishments, bars, shops etc: >I would guess the restaurant selection in San Miguel is greater than on STX. I doubt that, if you include all the expensive tourist ones. See my web page for some. But it sounds like we have different ideas about what a diving trip is all about. Also, I hear that some of the nice reefs on Cozumel have recently had cruise ship piers built over them. >Then they stretched the truth! >You want to really compare? >http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/8092/next.txt >$50/person/day for room and transport, $60 for two tank boat dives, $8/day >tank, weights may be extra!! Yes, but the boat dives are only $25 per tank if you do 10 dives. And the tanks are $40 per week for shore dives, but the new guy there said that extra fill will be $3.50 each. Not as good as deal as last time :-( Weight is $2 per day (but I should have enough for 4 people at Northside and that is free) I have tanks at Northside also, but it was not worth it to renew the hydro on them some years back. If I had enough people interested, I would go back to providing tanks. But that does not seem likely. >How you see $350/wk for the room and transport as being cheaper than Cozumel >(I quoted $369 for room and 10 boat dives) is beyond me..... I think clearly >your intent is not to look at alternatives, you want people to come with you >to VI. >Why could that be? First, many of the shore dives on St. Croix are very good, I would say (based on Kieth's comments) that they are better than the boat dives on Cozumel. Or than the boat dives on St. Martin. Second, the weather is likely to be better in St. Croix during the winter. Cozumel is too close to the continent. Even Jamaica get "northers" in the winter; I know, I was there. As a result of this, and maybe of the peso problem, St. Croix is a more expensive island. Did you see this from Lee McCreery ? (speaking of hotel rates on St. Croix) Lee McCreery : > I looked at other hotels on the island and the >average rate per room was around $120 - $150 per night. That is typical for St. Croix. It is not the cheapest place to dive. For that I would dive lake Mendota. If I ever find better diving, I will go there instead. (and I do plan to go back to Egypt, the only place where I have seen better diving than St. Croix). ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___(_O O_)___ooo_______________ (_) jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) Madison Wisconsin USA. This message was brought to you using biodegradable binary bits, and 100% recycled bandwidth.