Inactive Divers & Intent to Participate in Scuba, Snorkeling & Tankless Diving in The USA

Exclusive Dive Industry Survey Results on Scuba Diving, Snorkeling & Surface-supplied Air Diving in the USA

In 2021, the Business of Diving Institute conducted an exclusive survey of the American population to evaluate awareness, participation rate, dropout rate, and satisfaction for scuba diving, snorkeling, and tankless diving. We also evaluated the intent to participate by people who had never engaged with the activity.

This post is part of our Dive Industry Compass series by the Business of Diving Institute and Darcy Kieran, author of:

Awareness

The first step in selling any product or service is raising awareness. That is not a concern for the scuba diving industry.

Awareness levels:

Snorkeling: 96.8%
Tankless Diving: 46.6%
Scuba Diving: 96.4%

Americans know what snorkeling and scuba diving are. When is the last time you’ve talked to a stranger who had never heard of it? I can’t recall, personally. And that is what these numbers are stating.

In the dive industry and at DEMA meetings, there are often discussions about “the need” to make scuba diving more visible. That is a waste of marketing resources considering the fact that everybody (almost) knows what it is already. What we could need are the two next steps in marketing: getting the people who are aware to become interested in participating and then act on it.

However, as we will see later in this analysis, the intent to participate is quite high already. Therefore, what is missing is getting them to act on their interest.

Obviously, surfaced-supplied air (tankless) diving is not as well known by the general public, although 47% is a good start for that part of the industry.

Scuba Diving Market Survey Results

Scuba Diving Participation

There is a significant difference between active participants and people who have tried scuba diving at least once in their life.

The annual SFIA Scuba Diving report provides us with the active participation rate in the USA. In 2023, 3.1 million Americans went scuba diving at least once. This represents 0.9% of the American population and about 1.2% of adults 18 years or older.

Our Business of Diving Institute survey found that 32.7% of American adults have gone scuba diving at least once in their life.

Scuba Diving Dropout Rate

If we compare the 32.7% of American adults who have tried scuba diving to the 1.2% SFIA active participation rate, we get that only 3.7% of American adults who have tried scuba diving were still active divers. We lost 96.3% of them!

Therefore, the dive training agencies who like to claim that the dive industry dropout rate is not an issue should stop misguiding their members. We need to find solutions, not deny the problems.

One of the reasons for this significant number of dropouts is the quality of the experience, on which we have conducted numerous surveys and market studies.

Pool Scuba Tryouts

Another reason for the number of dropouts between “I tried it” and “I went diving this year” appears to be pool scuba diving.

48.0% of American adults who have tried scuba diving reported having done so in a pool. These people were most likely participants in Discover Scuba experiences.

When I had my dive shop, we followed the marketing suggestions from our dive training agency and offered frequent free scuba tryouts in our pool with the goal of recruiting clients. In reality, the vast majority of them never registered in an open water scuba diving certification course. They probably marked scuba diving off their bucket list after that pool experience.

I have long suspected that scuba tryouts (discover scuba diving or DSD) were not contributing to growth in our industry. We’ve discussed it in Strategy: Fixing Scuba Tryouts & Entry-Level Scuba Diving Courses. DSDs are a good source of revenues for dive resort operators catering to tourists looking at ways to load up their credit cards during their tropical vacations, but it doesn’t seem to contribute to developing the industry beyond that quick one-time money grab.

Inactive Participants Considering Themselves Scuba Divers

Another key finding of this exclusive Business of Diving Institute survey is the difference between Americans who actually went scuba diving over a period of 12 months (1.2% of the population 18 years and older, based on the SFIA survey) and the number of people who still like to define themselves as scuba divers although they haven’t gone diving in a while.

In this survey, among people who had done scuba diving at least once in their life, 52.0% claimed they were still scuba divers, representing 17.0% of the population 18+. In other words, 17% of the adult population define themselves as scuba divers, although only 1.2% of that population actually did a dive in the last year. It’s mind-boggling!

This represents a huge opportunity for the dive industry. It’s a pool of 35.6M adults.

Since these people still define themselves as scuba divers, they appear to remain interested in the activity. So why aren’t they diving? That is what we need to find out and fix. I would venture to suggest that our processes are too complicated for most people. Increasing convenience (which is not the same as making it easy) would probably bring back some of these scuba divers.

Scuba Diver Satisfaction

We surveyed people who had tried scuba diving at least once in their life about the quality of the services they received during their underwater experience.

40.6% of respondents reported having been very satisfied, with another 18.8% somewhat satisfied, for a positive score of 59.4%.

Interesting! But what would be a normal level of satisfaction?

The average global customer satisfaction benchmark that includes all industries worldwide is 86%. We’re far from that!

Let’s think about that 59.4%… Imagine 10 people walking in a business, and only 6 of them are leaving satisfied with the service they’ve received. It’s bad! And let’s not forget that those unsatisfied people tell their friends and relatives.

There is a huge opportunity in the dive industry for a brand to establish itself and grow its business based on consistency in the quality of the experience.

Non-Divers Intent to Go Scuba Diving

Among survey respondents who had never tried scuba diving in their life, there was a notable interest to get underwater at one point.

19.5% of respondents declared to be very likely to go diving.
Another 10.5% were likely to do so.

That’s a total of 30% of non-divers, which means a market of 42.4 million adult Americans. Since the entire dive industry issues about 1 million certifications a year — worldwide — we are barely scratching the surface.

Snorkeling Market Survey Results

Based on this Business of Diving Institute survey, 69.8% of American adults have done snorkeling at one point in their life — somewhere between their backyard pool and the ocean.

We actually wanted to know how many Americans were familiar with using a mask and a snorkel. The pool factor is more significant with snorkelers than it was with scuba divers. 60.2% of those who have tried snorkeling actually did it in a pool.

A more important finding is the level of satisfaction with the service received by snorkeling tour operations. It is even lower than the results for scuba diving.

36.4% of respondents reported having been very satisfied with the service received while another 17.7% were somewhat satisfied, for a positive score of 54.0% compared to 59.4% for the service received by scuba diving operators.

It makes sense since, in many cases, the dive boat operator and the snorkeling boat operator are one and the same, with snorkeling often being treated as a nuisance required to increase the profitability of the dive boat.

Surface-supplied Air (Tankless) Diving Market Survey Results

As reviewed earlier, awareness for this type of diving (46.6%) is significantly lower than it is for scuba diving (96.4%) and snorkeling (96.8%).

Therefore, participation is obviously lower as well. Only 15.1% of American adults have participated in tankless diving at one point in their lives compared to 32.7% for scuba diving and 69.8% for snorkeling.

The dropout rate, however, is significantly lower. Only 19.2% of past surface-supplied air divers declared not participating in the activity anymore.

Among survey respondents who had never tried surface-supplied air diving but knew what it was, there was a meaningful interest to try it.

16.7% of respondents claimed to be very likely to go diving with such a system.
Another 8.3% were likely to do so.

That’s a total of 25% of aware Americans who had not tried it. Since the level of awareness is still low (46.5%), it means a current market size of 24.3 million adult Americans. With increased awareness, the market would only grow.

What do we conclude from this dive industry market survey?

Many executives in other industries would kill to get the levels of awareness and interest Americans have in scuba diving.

With these numbers, we should be booming — like numerous other outdoor activities have been in the last few years.

To grow our business, we need to stop hemorrhaging divers dropping out, starting by fixing the low level of satisfaction with the service they receive from scuba diving operators and reducing the complexity of our processes. Nowadays, whatever we offer has to be convenient to consumers.

We are in the business of helping people discover the rest of their world — the 70% made of water! We are not in the business of selling plastic cards and dive gear — these are ancillary products and services.

If we find ways to bring more people underwater, in a way that satisfies today’s consumers’ expectations so that they keep coming back, the rest of our products and services will sell by themselves.

Survey Methodology

This dive industry market survey was administered to 311 American respondents aged 18 and older on April 26 and 27, 2021. The margin of error is +/-5.7%, with a confidence level of 95%. Responses were gender and age-balanced based on the most recent census.

What’s next?

This was our first Business of Diving Institute survey administered randomly to a target population, with a limited number of respondents to test the market. Next, we would need to adjust the questionnaire and re-run it on a larger sample size with the following goals:

Understand better the current level of participation by people who have tried scuba diving to reconcile that figure with the active participation rate in the SFIA survey.
Investigate what we need as an industry to bring the dropouts back underwater.
Further quantify the size of the untapped market for scuba diving.
Investigate what we need as an industry to bring the interested non-divers underwater.

The low level of customer satisfaction is a major concern for the industry’s growth. It most certainly fuels the dropout rate. But understanding this issue and creating solutions for it will require a different kind of analysis. We’ve already reviewed this opportunity in “Strategy — Consistency in The Quality of The Scuba Diving Experience: Defining and using quality assurance and branding for customer retention and satisfaction in the dive industry.”

If you are interested in collaborating or co-sponsoring the next iteration of this survey, please contact us.

Have a look at more scuba diving market research, surveys, reports & statistics in Your Dive Industry Compass.

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Inactive Divers & Intent to Participate in Scuba, Snorkeling & Tankless Diving in The USA