PADIReviews of padi.com

Im making OWD in Germany. E-learning app is a catastrophe.. I guess they put it in google translate. There are safety topics i dont understand because of bad translation. I have to check on google everytime. PADI safed money at the wrong place... The price of the book is a lot.. but now im almost there to ask myself why i didnt bought the book instead...which is abt 100€ more expensive.. Didnt see to buy it because its so overpriced. My friend made much better experiences with SSI and im not sure if i am at the right place here.

It seems impossible to access to elearning course - I have tried every single option and spent hours trying to find a solution online. I can see that I am not the only one... This is too important and expensive too not work!

PADI is a sham. I have actevily worked as an Instructor for twenty years in the scuba diving industy. Both as a PADI OWSI (Open Water Scuba Instructor) and a CMAS*** Instructor. For everyone who doesn't know, my CMAS qualification is way higher than my PADI qualification. The only reason I even bothered with PADI is that they have such a large market share, due to their excellent marketing machine and it is nearly impossible to get work in this Industry not being a PADI INstructor. This is about the only positive thing I can say about PADI, their marketing. I am also a certified Dive Industry technician and run a filling and service station, supplying a range of dive centers with air, nitrox and trimix, repairing and overhauling compressors and regulators and I also visually inspect and hydrostatically test scuba cylinders. Everytime PADI is changing standards, the only reason is to make it even easier and sell more courses opposed to their statement to increase quality. This is not so much an issue at amateur levels but all the more in the professional ranks as it gives even people with very low IQ the opportunity to become a so called diving professional. Standards have dropped so far in this Industry over the last two decades that I am wondering, there aren't more serious accidents. A few examples: No PADI Nitrox Instructor being tought today is able to calculate maximum operation depths (MOD) for a given gas, the partial pressure oxygen (PO2) for a given gas at a given depth or the necessary Gas fraction for a planned dive. All of which are essential for save Nitrox diving. I know this as my Nitrox cylinders are marked with the Gas fraction and the corresponding MOD as outlined in most diving associations guidelines. On a daily base these cylinders are being returned with the MOD being falsely corrected with wrong values. When I ask the Instructors why they did it, the most common answer is: my computer said so. Typical 'turn computer on and brain off' behaviour. No PADI instrctor today is able to answer why it is a problem that the volume of a closed flexible container (our lungs, when we hold our breath) decreses as pressure increases (descending) and increases as the pressure decreses (ascendng). Most common answer from a PADI Instructor nowadays is that your lungs may explode opposed to the correct answer that the product of pressure and volume is constant (P*V=C) and can lead to serious lung overexpansion injuries as well as so called reverse blocks (to name only the two most common issues). These where two physics related issues which can both lead to serious injuries and illnesses such as Decopression sickness (DCS), Oxygen toxicity, lung overexpansion injuries and more. The issue of pulmonary oxygen toxicity is not even touched in a PADI Nitrox course. Another problem I observe many a time is how Instructors deal with cases of skin bends (one type of DCS). In order to make the customer stay with the dive shop and get more dives in, many Instructors tell the customer that it is safe to continue diving after oxygen has been administered and the initial symptoms disappear. This is a potentally life threatening issue, as every hyperbaric physician will tell you, and can lead to longterm neurological issues. Due to the lack of understanding of partial pressures on the side of the Instructors (caused by PADI's poor educational system) even the air you are breathing, in many cases, is heavily contaminated with Aluminium oxydes or oil due to poor filter maintenance of the breathing air compressors. I could continue this list forever but it would get very technical and boring for most people. My conclusion is that if you only want to get a diving certificate, agree with PADI (Put Another Dollar In) and want to PADI (Pay And Dive Immediatelly), it's the way to go for you. But be aware that the only goal of PADI (Produce Another I diot Diver) is to make money, not educate and prepare you for safe diving procedures. For everyone seeking proper training, avoid PADI like the plague and look for a club based diving association such as CMAS or BSAC.

I bought a Online Course for Open Water Diver and the last page I saw after Payment was: Your transaction was successfully executed and the payment amount was booked. Because of a technical problem we are not able to show you the online receipt. - no E-Mail from Padi - no FAQ with this problem - can't login in the different "Login" Total disaster and very disappointed!

This is the absolute worst user interface I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve been working with computers and training since the early 1980s. What we used to call CBT or computer-based training running off a floppy disk was better than this stuff. There are multiple scrolling frames within the screen. In most cases you can’t see the study objectives or quickly refer back to them because in order to read them all you have to scroll them through a tiny window. The fact that there are multiple frames within the pages almost hidden because of the nonstandard scroll arrows that are used to indicate the individual frames. Upon first glance it just seems confusing that the content in the first part of the page doesn’t flow sensibly to the next part of the page… Until you figure out they you have to scroll with in the page to make it work. There’s at least three of these frames on each page, meaning that you can’t see what you’re trying to do. You can’t do a quick check back up the page to cross reference information you’ve just read. You can’t look at the entire quiz because it’s in its own damn frame. You can’t even print the study objectives or the quiz to keep them at hand to do a retest. Rather than spending time studying the content, I’m spending my time fighting the UX. I’m never going to remember this crap because I’m spending more mental energy figuring out what the hell is going on with the page rather than the content in the page. Absolutely awful, shameful and ridiculous. Pedagogically, this is the worst thing I’ve seen in decades. Someone should be fired. I am absolutely furious. I came here to learn, not to fight with a deliberately hard to use UI. And yes, make no mistake this is deliberate. The goal is to make it impossible for you to save this to your system, print it out, or use it off-line. Fine. Then give me the option to buy a PDF. Don’t force me through this crap. If I’d known how bad this experience was going to be, I would’ve come up some other option.

Online learning from Padi is a joke, and an expensive one at that. I've spent several days talking with customer service trying to resolve the issues but the elearning won't work, in fact it won't even open to the lessons. CS said they'd try to log in on their end, and after that apparently failed sent it off to IT, when asked for an estimate on when they'd get back in touch they stopped responding. Having just driven ten hours to Florida to do my advanced open water cert it is frustrating to be unable to do the elearning at all.

I've spent hundreds of dollars on a dive course only to be faced with the worst software I've ever come across and cant even log into. I really expected more from an organisation this large and reputable. Just read the rest of the reviews. I'll be starting a consumer protection case over this. Once they start facing some real heat they might do something about this joke of an e-learning system that people are paying so much for.

I am currently having the exact same issue with my Advanced Open Water eLearning course as the previous customer: This is RIDICULOUS. I don't even know how to contact someone for help! I've just paid a fortune ($195) for the advanced open water theory course, and the system doesn't work! When I tried to log in, it said, "You are receiving this page because you have multiple eLearning browser windows open." I cleared my cache and cookies, and still got the same message. So I opened a different browser, managed to log in, but couldn't actually open the course. The button was un-linked. Logged out, tried it on my phone. Same problem. Came back to the browser, and now I'm getting the following message again: "You are receiving this page because you have multiple eLearning browser windows open." Clearing my cache and cookies does NOTHING. This is absurd! Anyone can build a website these days. For the amount of money people pay for PADI how is it possible to justify having such an unbelievably bad system? How do I get help!?