25 Sep 2022
I have been diving with this company for several years. While their boat is lovely, shop staff are great and my husband was very happy with his snorkel guides, I do hope that they work on customer service skills of their dive guides.
I went out with Kohala on four days this September with three different guides. I’m
an experienced diver and have frequented many of the dive operations on the island. Kohala is one of the better ones and I love diving the north sites. However, there are few things that could be improved.
1. Site briefings are way too long. Five minutes would do it without baking in the heat. We don’t need to go through the fish book for 15 minutes. That’s a surface interval activity and if the guides spent that time on a debrief we’d be in the water faster.
2. Train your guides to engage with their divers underwater. Two of the three guides I dove with just swam around and pointed out a few things and kept going. On one dive, my guide told everyone that the garden eels weren’t there today. I literally stopped and watched them for a few minutes while the other divers swam on by. We also missed the five turtles and the shark because we didn’t even go to the area where they were and are almost always present. (I know the site well - I had dove it the day before and several times earlier that week)
3. Try to do better grouping your divers. My groups had a mix of very experienced and inexperienced or divers needing some accommodation. On my first dive, I sat on the bottom waiting for two divers to descend. For 15 minutes. One had not been weighted at all (I think) and the other had told them that she had problems equalizing and needed extra time (fair enough).
All that said, Kohala is a decent operation with a few rough edges to smooth. In general I had a good time. My husband who snorkels had a great time. I will return to a hopefully improved experience.
Kudos to Matthew and Mike for their attention and service both diving and snorkelling.Also to Max in the shop for her great service.