The Silver Age of Dive Resorts: A Brief History

The First Resorts

The concept of a dive resort — accommodation built around the diving infrastructure of a specific site — emerged in the 1960s as the sport grew beyond its club roots. The earliest examples were not resorts in any luxurious sense: a bungalow cluster, a compressor, and a local boat captain.

Peter Hughes and Wayne Hasson are credited with building some of the first purpose-built dive operations in the Caribbean and Red Sea in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Egypt, as Sinai came under Israeli control following the 1967 Six-Day War and opened to civilian access, operators like Orca Diving in Sharm el-Sheikh were established before any hotel infrastructure existed. Divers camped on the beach and paid for tank fills.

The Red Sea in the 1970s

The Red Sea became the crucible of dive resort culture in the 1970s. Ras Mohammed, the dive site that would later become Egypt's first marine national park, was accessible from simple Bedouin camps at the southern tip of Sinai. Jacques Cousteau had dived the area in the 1950s and declared it one of the finest dive regions in the world.

The key innovation of this era was the liveaboard — a dive vessel you slept on, allowing access to remote sites without land infrastructure. The first modern Red Sea liveaboards operated in the 1970s; by the 1980s, the liveaboard fleet in Egypt numbered in the hundreds.

Southeast Asia: The 1980s Boom

Bali opened to international tourism on a significant scale in the early 1970s, and dive operations followed quickly. Tulamben's USAT Liberty wreck — accessible from a beachside compound with a corrugated iron compressor shed — was attracting divers by the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, basic dive resorts had appeared in Bali, Koh Samui (Thailand), and on Palawan (Philippines).

Sipadan in Malaysia was discovered by a dive operator named Ron Holland in the early 1980s. The island — sitting 600 metres above the seafloor with a current-wrapped reef that seemed impossibly productive — attracted a handful of small operations.

The 1990s: Maturity and Professionalization

The 1990s saw the dive resort industry move from cottage scale to managed tourism. PADI's certification numbers grew exponentially; the internet began allowing divers to research and book resorts internationally; and the first dive travel agencies emerged as intermediaries.

The era also saw the professionalization of dive guide training: an industry that had been run largely by passionate amateurs formalized its instructor pathways. Divemasters became a distinct professional category, and resort dive operations developed standardized briefing, equipment rental, and boat management procedures.

The Infrastructure Today

The dive resort model the industry runs on today — compressor, fleet of tanks, guides, boat, equipment rental, instruction, marine park fees — was essentially complete by 2000. Subsequent developments (nitrox as standard, dive computers required, online booking) are refinements to a structure that emerged between 1965 and 1995.