PADIReviews of padi.com

They want $46 to get an electronic version of my membership card so I don't have to remember to bring it with me on trips. It's the same that they charge to produce & mail me a replacement card, which is just highway robbery. Unbelievable.

If I could give this zero stars, I would. I was PADI certified 30 years ago so I decided to go with PADI to get certified now as I trusted the name. Bad decision. I can not get the e-learning to load on either Chrome or Firefox. I have paid, I have received my number but when I try to log on, the window says "loading" and nothing happens. Unbelievably bad. With all the tech available for creating website, there is no excuse for something this bad. I am asking for my money back from the dive shop I signed up with. I will have to get certified another way or give up on getting certified. I work evenings so this is the only way I can do the course. So disappointed in this incredibly unprofessional site!

After reading all the reviews, most having the same issues over a longer time period I can only come to the conclusion that PADI is not taking this seriously. The reviews for their apps are similarly abyssal and the copy/paste replies from PADI regarding the issues are hilarious. When will these issues be dealt with?

We took PADI offline courses, the applications (iPad and iPhone) are outdated and full of bugs. It’s a mix of native content and iframed website pages, so you almost can’t scroll and need to zoom, pinch and login all the time. Now we can’t even send the results. Please just stop replying the same preformated message to each bad review as there are all the same and just fix your experience! This is without talking about the course itself. Mostly useless, but teach you well on how to buy PADI furnitures in the future. $190 worth $50 at most. This is what you have when the market is not competitive :-)

How should I put this? If you went diving with gear that functioned as reliably as PADI's eLearning system, you'd be alive exactly as long as you can hold your breath. Sections 1.7 and 1.12 would never load at all. Not even mad, just sort of numb that people would have the sack to sell training peoples' lives depend on that is broken. Oh, also, you need to click and drag to scroll, so even though it says it's for tablets, it can't be used without a mouse. Also, also, most of the labels on the equipment section don't render, so it'll say something like "3 - alternate air source" but you just gotta guess what that is, because there's no 3 (or any other number) on the accompanying image. It's okay, I'll probably never need to know what my alternate air source looks like. Also, also, also, the slide shows, including the one that's supposed to teach you the sign language needed (!!!!!!), are broken. What a joke.

If I could give 0 stars, I would! DO NOT waste your money. I purchased the elearning prior to going on vacation (where I planned to get certified) so that I could get "ahead" of the game. When I got to the resort, the dive shop (which goes through PADI) told me that I still had to pay their full $365 certification price even though I already paid to do the elearning...in the end I paid an additional $190 to do the exact same thing I could've done at the resort without the elearning. When I called PADI to see what they could do, they told me that I completed the elearning classes so they could not do anything. Enjoy your extra $190 PADI, maybe you can use it to fix your website which was constantly crashing while I was trying to use it! Thanks for nothing.

Loved the online course. Fully prepared me for the in-water portion. I’m looking forward to continuing my learning with PADI

If I had known how bad PADI e-learning was, I would have PAID LESS for the written manual or gotten certified by another organization. The online e-learning materials are TERRIBLE- the server doesn't load the pages properly and seems to time out in the middle of quizzes/exams... the mobile app doesn't render the content properly on an iPhone, the scrolling doesn't render properly on google chrome. My friend and I collectively wasted 48hrs of our time on your broken e-learning interfaces. Strangely, his e-learning course was DIFFERENT than mine, as though there are multiple courses? His had videos that you couldn't scroll through or rewatch/rewind. Mine had content within random frames that made it inoperable to slide around and read, assuming the pages loaded at all- and no this wasn't our bandwidth issue - we have a gigabit connection working fine- this was on your server's end. This is the definition of a monopoly gone bad. I'm surprised there isn't a class-action suit against PADI for stealing $190 and providing such a bad online/e-learning experience. If you pride yourself on safety, serve up these materials in a reliable fashion so people don't end up in a situation where they are unable to access the materials in the middle of an open-water dive cert - THAT is unsafe. This is a problem YOU CAN SOLVE with $30K, AWS, a week of a server programmer's time and a week of a mobile programmer's time. Get your IT guy to fix this. It costs nothing. The reviews online for the e-learning are horrible and mention this problem going back a couple years- why/how you haven't fixed it yet is unfathomable- it's either ignorance or incompetence or more likely negligence. Honestly, in the interim, you'd be better off just scanning the damn manual, uploading it, and serving it up as an EPUB/PDF. I'm surprised there isn't a class-action lawsuit against you guys for monopolizing this space, charging such exorbitant rates for e-learning, and THEN delivering the worst-period-experience-period-ever I have encountered with e-learning. Look - make your money off monopolizing the certification process, not the distribution of the material. Host your content on AWS and host those videos on youtube/vimeo, publish the manual as an epub, and you can still charge for taking/passing the quizzes and registering/certifying as a diver. Outside of all this, diving is an amazing sport, the Maui Diving shop was an amazing place to learn, and our instructor was exceptional, and we had incredible experiences under the water in Maui. I'd recommend them to anyone else who wants to learn diving. Also, despite the delivery, the actual PADI learning CONTENT information was great - manual + some videos- if you are going to get certed with PADI, save yourself a nightmare and just buy the physical manual.