What should a dive centre in the Caribbean run on?

Bonaire and Curaçao: shore diving, drive and dive

The Bonaire National Marine Park covers the waters around Bonaire and Klein Bonaire from the high-tide mark to 60 metres, and every diver pays a nature fee for each calendar year. Most Bonaire diving is from the shore: divers collect cylinders from the shop and drive to the marked sites. Curaçao mixes shore sites such as the Tugboat and Mushroom Forest with boat trips to Klein Curaçao.

For a shore-diving shop the kit room is the business. DiveOps logs who took each item with a tap check-out, adds rentals to the booking so they are priced and returned without paper, and warns you the day something is overdue.

The Cayman Islands: walls, wrecks and marine parks

Grand Cayman's centres run boats to the Kittiwake wreck and the North Wall, Little Cayman has Bloody Bay Wall, and Cayman Brac has its own walls and wrecks. The islands' marine parks, first set up in 1986, were expanded in 2021 to cover about half of the coastal waters.

DiveOps keeps one library of your sites, builds each boat's trip sheet from the bookings with the capacity maths done for you, and shows live spaces on your booking page so a place on a busy cruise-ship day is never sold twice.

The wider Caribbean and hurricane season

From the Turks and Caicos and the wreck of the RMS Rhone in the British Virgin Islands to Dominica, St Lucia and Barbados, the water stays warm, around 26°C to 29°C, all year. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to November, and a centre needs to move trips without losing track of anyone.

DiveOps lets a centre plan the season once, with a fallback site for each day and live weather and tide for your exact spot, and publishes each day's plan to the crew and to a screen in the shop.

A 24/7 WhatsApp front desk

Caribbean centres hear from divers in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and the rest of Europe, often planning weeks ahead and often after hours. DiveOps' WhatsApp AI answers on your centre's own number through the official Meta Business API, replies in under 2 minutes, handles around 92% of routine questions itself and sends your booking link. A person at the shop takes over any chat that needs one.

US dollars and one login

Most Caribbean dive shops price in US dollars, which is also Bonaire's own currency, and DiveOps runs bookings, the shop till, payroll and reports in them. Payroll works out each instructor's commission on their own rate, and centres get roughly 8 hours a week of admin back.

DiveOps is one plan with every feature, priced by the number of divers you run through the year. Book a demo and see it set up against your own sites, kit and boats.