Barefoot Dive Center Cozumel — Local services in San Miguel de Cozumel

After checking with my friend who is an experienced diver. I changed my review from 5 star to 1 because I think it's important for some things to stand out among the 5 star reviews. The ocean gave me a 5 star experience because I'm a beginner, but their business practice and protocol were subpar and needs to be said.

First, the sales guy, Omar, was very dishonest and made a lot of unfulfilled promises to us. We are a group of 4, with 2 of us having no experience swimming in the ocean, one very experienced diver, and one who's a great swimmer. So one person took the 2 boat dives while the other 3 took discovery scuba dives.

We were told we could stay together and get some group photos. I was in the discovery and got told to go to another teacher AFTER GETTING IN THE WATER. They could have mentioned it above first. It was disorienting to be separated from my friends in the ocean to an instructor I barely talked to. 3 of us on the discovery paid for photos. (So like 75$ usd total?) We had 0 group photos in the water. But I know that is hard to coordinate but we couldn't really stay together either. There were only a handful of good photos, but don't expect anything that professional. The 3 of us in the discovery tour all met Phil at the beginning and was told he was our teacher. But then right after we got in the water, I was told to go with Adi, who I only briefly met. I was separated from my friends with no warning and went with an unknown teacher. This was disorienting.

Beginner swimmers (especially new to the ocean): I learned after that it's quite difficult to control your buoyancy and control your movement, but it turns out 3 of us were under-weighted. The teachers should have done a buoyancy check when we got in the water to see how we sink and give us more weights. That did not happen. We kept floating up and feeling like it was our fault. Controlling your body to dive down and up was not explained. They could have checked it at the beginning of our beach dive, taught us, so we can practice more. But instead I was taught at the end of my beach dive. During my beach dive, my instructor did a lot of hand signals I couldn't understand because I was taught by the other guy! This was frustrating and made me unable to enjoy the dive. All in all, my instructor did drag me by he hand the whole time so I could experience the dive but I wish I was told these expectations beforehand.

The food was mediocre: stale sandwich bread and a single slice of ham/lettuce/cheese.

They said it was a big boat and we wouldn't get motion sickness, but we took a Dramamine just in case. One of our friends got dizzy and nauseous after the beach tour-- that could have been a warning? They are supposed to be professionals, no? We all went on the same boat dive for the second one. Our friend was still sick there because going down to the dry-room/bathroom area was very disorienting. She could not continue the 2nd dive. There was no offer of partial refund or to tag along for another day to make up for it. The rest of us also felt a bit sick from the boat, but our teachers didn't care and didn't ask us anything.

Oh and we were told the second dive was at the El Cielo national park but it was just a random reef called Yucab. No one told us this before, so it felt like false advertisement too.

This shop charges some of the highest prices in the area and you would expect top tier service and quality for everything but no, it's probably all the same. We went in thinking it was reputable and professional, but I think the discovery dive instructors are probably all very new and inexperienced. My experienced diver friend's instructor (Christina?) seems a lot nicer and knowledgeable. She offered us peppermint oil at the end when she found out some of us were getting boat sickness.

Anyway, the ocean + diving is great, just find better people or at least better prices if you're gonna get the same...

If I could give these guys 10 stars I would!!

We found out about this dive shop when my Cressi BCD got lost in the mail prior to a trip to Cozumel. Cressi recommended them as a vendor to check out and they had the model and size in stock. We foolishly had planned on taking the car ferry from Playa to Cozumel, but the schedule is currently unreliable, so we didn’t end up getting to Cozumel until around 8pm. The owner (Omer) met us at the shop after hours (little did we know he had just had a baby, so he probably wanted to get out of the house… Lol) and we had a good talk with him about diving, about full face masks (which we dive with and he used to use when he was an underwater welder), and just overall diving experiences around the world while we purchased the BC and immediately felt very comfortable with the shop. Especially after talking about dive situations in Cozumel we had experienced before. One thing we don’t like is when a dive master/guide is responsible for a lot of divers, and it seems that it’s normal practice in Cozumel for dive places to book 1 dive master to 6-8 divers. As seasoned divers, we understand the dangerous logistical nightmare that this presents in the event of an emergency. So, we hadn’t been happy with previous dives in Cozumel due to that common practice.

We had already had free dives booked with our resort we were staying at, but since Omer had come in after hours and the conversation was interesting, we decided to book a day with Barefoot Dive Center as a way to show appreciation for the situation. BEST DECISION WE COULD HAVE MADE!! Me and fiancé were paired up with Renata (just us two) and she was amazing. After doing over 175 dives around the world, it was refreshing to meet a diver instructor so passionate about the dive sites and one who actually took the time to explain the pros and cons of the dive sites chosen for the day, as well as give us options on what we wanted to do as divers (i.e. more swim throughs, more reef side, more marine life, etc). She was extremely knowledgeable of the locations and the color prints of the dive sites she showed us helped us visualize what to expect at each location (as well as get the names of the locations). After our first day of dives with the shop, we canceled the rest of our free dives with our resort and booked the next two days of dives with Barefoot! That’s just how good the experience was! When talking to the members of the shop or being out with Renata and talking about other things outside of diving, it felt like family and friends. That’s the type of environment that they gave. Even Taco (dive shop dog) was fun and the vibe/environment was above and beyond previous visits to Cozumel.

If you are ever in the area and want a truly professional dive shop, yet still have the environment that you are hanging out with friends and family then I highly recommend this shop for your dive experience in Cozumel. Any time we go back to dive, we will ONLY work with them for...

My review has two parts.

Part one I would actually only give two stars, and that is for service coordinating dives on the mainland. I signed up to do a 5 day package, including 1 day of cenote dives, which required me to take the ferry back over to Playa del Carman. I assumed based on how this was advertised on the Barefoot website that it was their own dive guides that offered this. No. They work with freelancers in Play for the cenote, bull shark, and whale shark dives. There are a ton of dive shops in Playa that offer this dives, and I recommend booking directly through one of those shops. The barefoot office staff added as a go-between just made coordination more convoluted. My group was given the wrong meet up location in Playa, and when the freelance guide (nicknamed "No-no", real name I believe was Luce or something similar) arrived, he was irritated with us for being at the "wrong" location. He continued to be increasingly rude and hostile towards me when I made the most basic recommendation about offering more landmarks for future meet-up locations. I felt unsafe with him, and had to ask him to pull over at least 6 times before he finally did so and let me out of his truck. While Barefoot did reimburse me for the dive and say they took my complaint seriously, they also were very dismissive about it, suggesting that I had just been irritable and was equally a part of the problem. They stated no one else had every complained, almost gaslighting me about the complaint they said they took seriously. Based on how the owner/manager handled this complaint, I doubt I book with Barefoot at all in the future.

My second review portion is for the dive guides. I had Sander as my guide for two days of diving, and Phil as my guide for one day. Both were absolutely amazing! I could not say anything but positive about both of them. They both deserve 10+ stars. Both were kind, helpful, and more than covered everything about the dives they could to make each diver as comfortable as possible. They gave each new diver a tour of the boat, outlined where to put things, briefed each dive so divers knew exactly what to expect, and provided a debrief back at the shop at the end of the day to go over details for the log and answer any questions. I felt incredibly safe and well taken care of with both of these...