- Playa del Carmen, Mexico
- dive@tankha.com
- 08:00-19:00 7 days
We believe in fairness and clarity
On this page we have fully explained our terms & conditions and our cancellation policy.
This section does NOT apply if you are taking part in a Open Water course or Discover Scuba Diving Experience.
If you are a certified diver and joining one of our dive trips you will need to prove your level of certification. This is typically done using a physical card or an eCard on your phone. Please remember that a log book does not provide proof of dive certification.
If you don’t have access to a certification card you should contact us in advance to ask us to search for you in a database for the agency through which you are certified. By obtaining this confirmation you can be confident that you will be able to join the dive you reserve with us.
When you make a booking via our website we will ask you to provide more details about yourself and any other divers who will be diving with you. We will then review this information (normally within 2 hours*). We will get in touch to confirm your dives or discuss any potential alterations with you.
This manual confirmation process is critical because we will…
If we can’t provide the exact trip that you have reserved, we will contact you to suggest a modified plan. If you don’t like the modified plan we can issue a full refund.
*We aim to review your booking within 2 hours during our standard business hours (7 days per week, 08:00-18:00)
Depending on the dives you book with us there will be one or more documents that contain various legal statements that you will need to review and sign prior to diving or taking part in any in-water training.
If you would like to see these documents and check the wording of the documents prior to making a commitment to a dive reservation then please contact us and we can send you a copy of the documents.
During our communications with you, we may ask you for details regarding your level of dive experience and the experience of others in your group. It is vitally important that you provide us with accurate information. Failure to do so may mean that you or one of your dive buddies may not be able to take part in the dives that you have reserved.
We operate recreational dives for students and certified divers between 6m/20ft and 40m/130ft.
Many dive agencies provide additional training in order to safely enjoy dives at different maximum depths. Many dive insurance providers will only cover you ‘up to a depth to which you are trained’ and inline with best practice recommendations we don’t take divers below the depth to which they can prove they have been trained to go.
We understand that other dive centers will routinely take people beyond their training limits, but for reasons of safety and professionalism this is not something we are willing to do. You may wish to contact us to discuss the PADI Deep Adventure dive which allows us to provide deep training to you with minimal hassle.
If you choose to make a deposit for your dive through our website and pay the balance while with us in the store you can pay your balance in the following ways:
*Payments in Mexican Pesos (MXN) are calculated based on the exchange rate taken daily from xe.com
With our diverse range of dives and courses available, we need to manage the schedules of multiple instructors, boats, trucks, swimming pools, tanks and dive equipment to allow us deliver our dives on a daily basis.
When you make a reservation you will need to pay deposit to cover the cost of reserving resources. The deposits required are outlined below:
You are welcome store your personal dive gear in the dive center while you are diving with us. We have multiple rinse tanks and plenty of room to hang your gear to dry in a safe and secure environment.
Storing your equipment with us can make the process of billing much simpler since we won’t need to pay a deposit in advance to reserve each of your dives and you can simply settle you bill for all your dives at the end of your trip. When you request a dive we will make the booking and reserve resources for you on the understanding that if you cancel one of your dives you may need to pay a cancellation fee equal to the value of the deposit amounts outlined in the previous section above.
If you require a Factura Fiscal for the products or services you purchase please advise us at the moment you make your reservation and when you make any payments. The generation of a factura fiscal may affect some of the discounts we may be able to offer you.
When we foresee bad weather, we may ask you if you would like us to plan a backup dive option for us to implement should your primary activity become unavailable. You are under no obligation to pick a backup option and if we are unable to operate your primary activity then we can provide a full refund.
If you choose to reserve a backup activity then our standard cancellation policy will apply to your newly selected backup activity because we will be reserving resources to allow us to provide you with the backup activity.
You will need to you will need to complete a medical self-evaluation form. Please visit ScubaMedical.com where you can check your medical eligibility for diving by answering a series of simple questions. Based on your responses, ScubaMedical.com will tell you if you will need to obtain approval from a doctor prior to diving with us.
IMPORTANT: Please ensure that all divers taking part in training personally verify their medical eligibility (and obtain medical clearance if necessary) prior to arriving at the dive center. It is generally not possible to obtain medical clearance at the last minute prior to the departure of your trip and therefore your dive might be cancelled and this would incur cancelation fees.
Before diving with us, you will need to agree to a series of safe diving practices. Part of this agreement includes a declaration that you are medically fit for diving. You may remember that during certification or any subsequent training you will have been asked to complete a self-assessment and potentially visit a Doctor if the self-assessment raised any concerns.
The medical self-assessment was updated in June 2020. This update was primarily triggered because of potential complications for diving caused by COVID-19. We recommend you familiarize yourself with the latest self-assessment and consult a doctor if you are unsure if you are medically fit to dive.
Generally our maximum group size is 5 divers per guide in the ocean and 4 divers per guide in the cenotes. On rare occasions where we have regular clients who are highly experienced we might add these divers to your group. Many times their presence can actually be an overall benefit to the group as they are often able to assist our guide or find some beautiful things on the reef.
Please remember that despite the maximum group sizes mentioned above you will normally be on a boat or at a cenote with other divers. We have our own boats in Playa del Carmen with a maximum capacity of 10 and 16 divers. The boats we use to head directly to Cozumel have a capacity of up to 18 divers. On occasion we may need to place you on boats that we contract for your booking. The Cenotes are public spaces with controlled, paid access. Accordingly, we have no practical way of controlling the total number of people who may be in the cenote during your trip.
If the total number of divers on a trip is of concern for you, please contact us before reserving and we can give you accurate information for the dates you are interested in and we can make notes of any special requirements you may have.
Most of the prices on our website are for our standard trips in which we will group divers together with a guide. We do our best to ensure that divers in each group have an appropriate level of skill/experience to safely complete the dive. Where possible, we try to match experience levels within each group.
Every diver is different and in particular gas-consumption can vary between divers. Where we are aware of divers with high gas-consumption we will do our best to provide larger tanks or send additional members of our team to allow the higher gas-consuming divers to end their dive early without affecting the dive time of other clients. However this is not always possible and we can’t guarantee a minimum dive time or amount of gas you’ll be able to breathe before we need to end the dive. It is crucial that safety remains our number one priority.
If you are concerned about the amount of time you will be able to dive, you can book a private guide to accompany you or your group on your trip. This way the performance or gas consumption of other divers will not affect your dives.
The course prices found on our website are our standard prices and we have outlined our standard schedules. It is important to remember that all diver training courses are performance based and paying for the course does not guarantee a certification. Our instructors are obliged by their training and membership of professional dive agencies to only certify students who meet the required skill level.
If you are unable to meet the performance requirements within the schedule then it may be necessary to conduct additional training sessions with you. This happens very rarely and we do our best to avoid having to charge you for course extensions. Where we need to charge we try to keep the additional costs as reasonable as possible.
PADI and SDI are international organizations. We are not owned or run by PADI or SDI, instead, our instructors are trained to teach courses that are created by these organizations.
Although we do guarantee seeing whale sharks, unfortunately it is not possible to guarantee that you will be able to snorkel with the whale sharks. If we don’t find any whale sharks you will be offered a rescheduled date or a full refund.
It’s not possible to guarantee the number of jumps or amount of time swimming with the whale sharks because this is an experience in the wild and many factors can affect the activity. For example if you have a great jump with many whale sharks and manta rays all around for maybe 10 minutes then you may only get one other jump, but if you have a short jump for only a couple of minutes with one whale shark before it swims off then this should mean there is enough time for you to have more repeated jumps. Ultimately, we, the guides and the captains want you to have the best time possible, so we will do everything possible to get you in the water for as long as we can. However there are restrictions on the maximum amount of time each boat can remain in the whale shark vicinity and we need to share this time amongst all the other snorkelers on the boat (maximum 10 people).
We cannot guarantee swimming with the sharks because if on a particular day we can only find a few sharks in the area and there are many boats nearby then marine park rules don’t allow everyone to jump in next to just a few whale sharks because this would cause them too much stress.
Whenever possible, we take the time to search a wider area looking for additional whale sharks away from other boats, in which case you would be able to enter the water. This situation is VERY rare and hasn’t happened to our clients at all since 2016.
We are normally able to avoid this situation because when we become aware that the conditions or number of sharks is not favorable we avoid booking tours at these times or advise clients they may wish to reschedule their booking.
Because we need to book specific resources for the activity you reserve it is very difficult to accept cancellations – particularly at late notice. If you request to move your booking to another day, this will be treated as a cancellation of the original day and a new booking for the new date.
If you have paid in full for a dive then the difference between the full payment and the deposit will always be refundable. We will only ever retain the deposit element of your payment.
The following cancellation fees apply to our services:
(High season is 15th December to 15th January)
1 Proof of flight booking and flight cancellation by airline required.
2 A doctor’s note from a local doctor required. If one person in your group is sick, the entire group can reschedule.
3 A doctor’s note from a local doctor will be required. The sick person mentioned in the note can be rescheduled, but due to the last minute nature of this cancellation, we cannot reschedule any members of the group who are not sick. This happens very rarely, and of course we hate when we need to do this, but unfortunately we need to pay significant amounts to our instructors and other suppliers in the event of a last-minute calculation.
NOTE: Only one re-scheduling of your booking following a cancellation is possible.
There are occasions where we not able to provide the dives/courses/trips that we scheduled with you. Under the following circumstances you would be entitled to a full refund for the particular activity.
The issues here are extremely rare, but we are listing them because these are things that have actually happened in the past. Under these circumstances if we choose not to take you diving it will not be possible to refund your deposit.
These are the core medical questions associated with PADI Discover Scuba Diving. If you need to answer YES to any of these questions you would need medical sign-off from a doctor.
This is only a quick check to help you right now. Before booking any training you should check the full medical and liability statements associated with the course.
We proudly take our divers in small groups to provide the best service.
Small groups allow us to focus our time and attention on you to make sure you have the safest and most enjoyable experience possible.
Discover Scuba Diving / Open Water
Maxiumum 4 divers per Instructor
Playa del Carmen / Cozumel dives
Maximum 5 divers per Instructor
Cenotes
Maximum 4 divers per Instructor
We consistently invest in new equipment and maintaining our equipment in excellent condition.
We are proud major-brand equipment we provide. Our standard equipment rental items are:
