Manta Divers Sharm 2.76

Jane 04-14-2022 10:22AM
 
We booked a White Island tour with Manta dive sharm. Our experience was unfortunately not very positive. We are a family with kids and had mainly booked the tour to experience snorkeling.

First the good parts:
Nice boat
Good lunch
Good presentation of safety rule in the beginning although difficult to understand due to accent

The reasons we would not recommend this tour
-very rushed and stressful
-very limited time for snorkeling

8am came the bus to pick us up, after stopping at other hotels for other guests, 9:15 we came to the port, and 10:30 we finally got on the boat, 11:30 got to white island, then had 25-30mins there. All along with shouting from the instructor that we should move faster etc.

Long time to get a things organized to get there but barely had much time to experience much.

But then we had a second destination so we kept our hopes high.

The only thing is they somehow couldn’t find a person on board after leaving the first diving spot (didn’t count the people well before leaving), and were frantically yelling on the boat for the guy and the boat was also sailing back to find him. Fortunately it somehow got resolved later on, but the whole thing was quite chaotic and i presume which led to them try to limit the people from snorkeling so that they wouldn’t get stressed of missing a person.

So at the second diving spot we went in.. 15mins later everyone had to come out…

We thought we were leaving so we waited 30mins.. then we see the divers were still swimming. So we went down and asked if we can snorkel… we were told yes since they will stay 30mins longer! So we went in the water and then after 5mins were yelled at to hurry back on the boat.

We thought we were leaving…. After coming back on the boat and waiting another 30mins.. the boat was just parked there and divers still in the water.

Went down and asked how much longer we will stay, answer was 30mins. We asked then if we could snorkel, one guy said yes the other guy says no. I told them we were stay right in the front area, since there was anyway only 2corals in front of the boat.

Finally we got the green light, plunged in the cold water only to be yelled at after 4mins to come back in fast.

Again we thought we were leaving, same story again repeats, we wait, divers diving, we still wait on the boat… it was almost 2hours since the boat was parked at that spot, with us having minimal access to the water.

I heard a lady complain to the crew what were we all doing there.

I asked why i was allowed to snorkel only 5mins when the boat was parked for 2hours, barely no one was snorkeling and i was only staying in front of the boat.

As much as i appreciated the nice lunch and nice boat, my time was just wasted by being stranded on that boat by the authoritative and unpleasant workers.

I am sure they had a hard day, the work is not easy etc but had i known that my 8-9hours on that boat would be allowing me to snorkel 45-50mins max i would have never booked this. Th