If going on a Scuba diving liveaboard is on your bucket list but your travel budget will not allow it there may still be hope. Last minute travel may be the answer to your fiscal shortcomings. Unlike other industries, “last minute” on a scuba diving liveaboard may still be few months away.
Let’s talk about the hospitality industry in general so that you can understand the situation companies in the industry faces. If a night passes with a hotel room vacant, a plane has an empty seat or a cruise ship sails with an empty cabin, that asset is lost. It also has a real cost to it. In a retail location, if an item does not sell it still can be sold the next day. That is not so with hotel rooms or cruise ships.
In business, you have two main type of expenses, fixed and variable. If a plane flies from London to Berlin, the cost to the airline would vary only slightly between having a full plane or one with half the seats empty. That because the majority of the expenses are fixed. The crews salaries, maintenance cost, fuel cost, landing fees and similar will not change based on the number of passengers. The cost of food served and per passenger security fees would change but very little else would. The same thing happens with cruise ships. Empty staterooms do not bring in any income but they still have expenses. The difference between the expense of an empty stateroom and occupied one is mostly the cost of the food used. If a cruise line, at the last minute, sells a stateroom at a rate above that difference, they improve their profits. So when it is getting close to sailing, the cruise line will lower their prices to bring guest into any empty stateroom.
A scuba diving liveaboard is in the same situation, however, it can be more important to the liveaboard to fill those empty spaces than the cruise ships. If a cruise ship has a couple of empty staterooms it does not matter, since they have thousands full. However, if one stateroom on a liveaboard with only ten staterooms is empty that is a 10% reduction of income. A cruise ship has a great deal of flexibility to get those cabins filled. They can contact travel agents and give them incentives. Shuffle passengers around giving upgrades to make the lower cost staterooms available. And offer sales on their websites. They can do that because of their volumes.
The scuba diving liveaboard industry is not as free to do that. First, posting sale prices on their websites, does not ensure that potential customers will see it. More likely existing booked passengers will see it and be upset that someone that is booking later is getting a better price. A cruise ship may have 20 or more types of stateroom categories so it is harder to compare, a liveaboard just one or two categories.
When the management of a liveaboard sees that it might not be sailing full, they can contact agents that are marketing their vessels with special pricing. These agents will then market the individual dates to their clients. The website divezone gathers these special offers and makes them available in one place.
Their Liveaboard Special Offers & Last Minute Deals page has a range of offers that can help bring the cost of a liveaboard trip into your budget range. The last minute deals might be within a few weeks, but can also be a few months out. The special offers can even be more that 6 months out. The current list even has some 50% off offers. Head over to the website and see if there are any offers that fit what you want to do.
