Many skydiving vacations for first time skydivers are 'custom built' by hiring a skydiving instructor for the specific period of time for the vacation. If you are looking for the vacation of a lifetime and want to go somewhere interesting to skydive and have fun in the sun, you are probably best suited to n accelerated free fall course. If you are joined by family members, partners or friends who don’t feel the need to become qualified skydivers, they could come along and do a tandem skydive and enjoy the whole buzz without the intensity. If you’ve decided that your skydiving vacation will include some windtunnel time or some other activities, this would also be a great option for those who have said very clearly that they don’t want to skydive. Strangely enough, when they see ‘skydiving without the fear’ they usually love it and want to give it a go, although they can also enjoy themselves enough by watching, taking photographs and filming. If you can bring together a group of (ideally) four to do an AFF course you could find this is the perfect tailor made activity vacation. This approach also works for individuals although it may cost a little more.
Skydiving certification in your home country
A major benefit to taking an instructor from your home country is that your AFF Instructor will be teaching the system to include any special requirements for your home country, and she will also be able to sign your licence applications for your home country. This means that when you get back and want to carry on, you can do it with the minimum of fuss and cost. In many UK centers, if you are a recent graduate from a course in a non-BPA approved or Affiliated center and if you haven’t been trained by BPA instructors, the Chief Instructor will usually require you to do some additional local training and a check dive and this may well cost you another £150 or so. This is simply for safety and quality reasons because so many students have arrived from other training systems with critical items of training have been poorly taught or even omitted. Sometimes students have been trained on one deployment system and then need to be fully retrained. A good example of this is the SOS system used widely in Australia. In itself it’s a fine system and when adapted locally and used consistently it’s a good thing, but using it on ‘rest of world’ parachute systems without re-training can cause fatalities.
Locations for custom skydiving vacations
There are a number of instructors who organise specialised trips to nice sunny places where they can graduate you through the whole AFF system to become a licensed skydiver in maybe a week or two. I do this myself and although I favour Spain and Cyprus I’ve taught in most places. Other popular AFF destinations are Florida, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Czech Republic, Spain, France, Germany, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and the list goes on. If you have ideas for other locations then put them on the blog and we’ll see what we can come up with. We all tend to have our little ‘pet locations’ and AFF Instructors also collaborate on projects when they need another instructor for groups of multiple students.
It’s not a new thing, to take your own Instructor away with you. Scuba diving courses have been run like this for many years and that’s how I did my PADI Open Water and PADI Advanced courses and I brought a group of six like minded characters together and we all had an absolute ball diving in the red sea after doing our lectures and pool training in UK. For AFF courses, it’s quite useful when the instructor knows where the closest hotels are to the drop zone and where the other resources are (such as wind tunnels, car rental, swim pools etc). Don’t think this is just for the ‘movie star rich’ Your AFF instructor will be quite willing to work to budgets and will help you to achieve your objectives in the most cost effective way. One good budget option is to meet your instructor out at the location and tag onto the end of a pre-organised session. Some instructors commit their times in specific locations a year in advance and then book courses accordingly.
What if I don’t finish my AFF course on that trip?
The best thing in my view about taking your own instructor with you is that they will be available to get your course completed if by some chance you don’t get to finish your course while you’re in your vacation paradise. If you live in UK and travel to say, Florida with your AFF instructor and then something causes a delay, you’ll have the option to go to a drop zone back home to complete the AFF levels. Discuss this with your AFF instructor during the preliminary stages and get a clear agreement on this. While you’re having this conversation I suggest you also bring up the question of how much re-jumps will cost you (they should really be ‘at cost’) so get this clear in advance to prevent a nasty surprise.
These are a few of the points to take into account when considering going skydiving outside of your home country. We’ll be updating this paper from time to time so please make sure you take an rss feed from our site to keep you up to date on developments.
