There are times when it is difficult to believe what you are hearing, but in the past few of weeks I have been amazed at the number of people who seem to want to throw their money away by setting up from scratch new dive centres in Gran Canaria. I have heard rumours of new dive centres being set up in Mogan, in Puerto Rico and in Meloneras. Just a little bit of research would have told them the sad facts - that over the last five years 70% of the people who have tried it before them have both failed and lost lots of money. In fact over the last six years only two new dive centres have survived longer than two years, and both because they address specific language groups where there is no other dive centre (one Dutch, one Polish).
Add to this the current economic downturn and the strength of the pound, and finally all the new diving laws and regulations, and you begin to understand the barriers which any hopeful entrepreneur will face coming to the Island.
The Diving market in Gran Canaria is in fact quite mature. There have been diving centres on the Island for over 30 years, with most of the tourist centres based in the Mogan district. However in the last year two of these (Aquanauts and Sunset) have closed their outlets because of the combination of lower visitor numbers and tighter regulation of the diving business. This maturity also means that most of the common sales routes are taken by the existing Dive Centres - Most tour operators have long term contracts in place; all the big hotels have relationships with Diving Centres; The best sites for dive centres (at low cost) have already been taken; and there are several well marketed and informative websites already occupying the top search engine locations.
If anyone is coming into the Gran Canaria Diving market, and thinks they will be able to gain a significant share of the existing market, then they have already failed in their their basic business research and planning. The only way to be sucessful is to identify a specific niche and offer specialised services to those (new) sectors. So for example if somebody set up a Russian, or an Italian, or a Romanian dive centre they would probably survive on these small sectors and be able to bring new divers to the Island.
All the diving centres believe that Gran Canaria has much more potential as a diving destination, and up to 2008 diver numbers were increasing slowly before the recession hit; We all welcome initiaties which will bring more divers here, such as the Fotosub competitions in Mogan and Galdar. However if you think it is going to be either quick or easy to set up a new dive centre and start making a profit then you need to talk to the Norwegians who tried with 'Blue Ocean' or some of the other who have run 'dive centres' from the back of a pick-up for a few months in summer.
So if you do want to run a dive centre in Gran Canaria, then do your research properly, find out about the dive centre laws, and be prepared to put in a lot of money to cover low cash flow for up to the first two years. And if you struggle to put together a finacial plan, or don't see yourself as a salesman, either talk to somebody who can help you with these, or decide wether you really want to loose a lot of money during the recession even if you do enjoy the prospect of diving here.
