How Well-Covered Is Your Liveaboard Trip?

So you thought the Mystery Diver had retired? Never, not while there are services such as liveaboard-booking/ price-comparison websites to delve into!

WANT TO BOOK A HOTEL ROOM? Easy, just type “hotel rooms” into Google, and you’ll be introduced to a list of paid ads for Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, Trivago, Kayak, Laterooms and others.

There’s never been so much choice for the consumer, while for the hotel-owners, as one told me recently: “I couldn’t survive in this business without them.”

Want to book a flight and hotel? Then you need go no further than the likes of Expedia which, like many other similar search-engine sites has, since 2012, had to offer ATOL protection.

This means that if any part of your trip is cancelled, or your hotel or airline goes bust, you will be entitled to a full refund or, if you are already abroad, repatriation.

The problem with booking a hotel room on its own is that if anything goes wrong, your contractual agreement is not with the website but with the provider of the service.

As Trivago points out: “Trivago is a hotel search with an extensive price comparison. The prices shown come from numerous hotels and booking websites.

“This means that while users decide on Trivago which hotel best suits their needs, the booking process itself is completed through the booking sites (which are linked to our website).”

I have nothing against such sites. Indeed, for my travels I often use them to get really good deals on hotel rooms, better often than going direct.

What is interesting from a diving perspective is how this business model is now creeping into the diving market. To explore this development further, I typed “liveaboard diving holiday” into Google.

What it brought up as Google Ads, listed in the order presented, was: Liveaboard.com; Diviac.com and Regaldive.