Which Registers Can Be Read, and What Each Returned
A directory is worth what its sources are, so this is the working. Twenty-five governing bodies and state registers have been asked for a list of operators, and nine of them answer. Each row below says what the request returned and on what date. Seventy of the seventy-four operator lists here rest on one of the nine; four rest on nothing but our own reading, and they say so in their opening line.
What "readable" means here
One thing only: can a list of operators be retrieved by an ordinary client, so that a page can honestly claim to show everyone a body carries in a place? Not whether the body is respectable, not whether its standards are good. Several of the failures below are serious organizations doing real work. They simply do not publish a list anyone can read.
Two things it does not mean. It does not mean the body's website is readable: most of these answer through the endpoint their own map or finder calls, and serve a human nothing without JavaScript. That distinction is what this page got wrong for a week. And it does not mean the entries can be cited: a source is only usable here if each record has a page that names the business, so a reader can open it instead of taking our word. Green Fins is the case that separates the two, because it is the best evidence in this project and cannot be linked to entry by entry.
Where a page renders its content with JavaScript we did not execute, that is recorded as a failure of our reading rather than proof of absence, which is why each row says what the request actually returned instead of just "no".
The 26 registers checked, and what each one returned
Each row carries the date that register was last actually read, and nothing here restates an old finding as a fresh one.
| Body | Sport | Verdict | Asked | What it returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green Fins | Diving | Readable | 26 Aug 2026 | 362 members worldwide, with the membership level and whether an assessor visited in person. It is the only source here where somebody went and looked. Its member pages are the catch: greenfins.net returns the same 287,636 bytes for a real center id and an invented one and names neither, so a Green Fins fact is stored with a center id and never cited as a link. |
| CDWS (Egypt) | Diving, watersports | Readable | 21 Aug 2026 | Egypt's Chamber of Diving and Water Sports, and a statutory one: a dive center has to be a member to trade legally. 311 members across eleven paginated pages, each with a membership number, town and contact. Absence from it means something quite different from absence from a voluntary scheme. |
| RNAAT (Portugal, state) | All tourism | Readable | 21 Aug 2026 | The state register of tourism animation agents, and the strongest source in this project. One request, 1.7 MB after a redirect to the ArcGIS hub: 13,152 establishments, 29 columns, with the license number, address and the activities each is licensed for. 1,300 hold the board-sport permission and 253 the diving one. Portuguese law makes the operator print its RNAAT number in its own material, which closes the loop from register to business with no name matching at all. Its limit is in its own wording: surf, bodyboard, windsurf, kitesurf, skiming, standup paddle boarding e similares is a single legal item, so the license cannot say which of those a school teaches. |
| SSI | Diving | Readable | 24 Sep 2026 | 3,868 training centers in 138 countries in one request, with city, country, coordinates, a website for most and an email for every one. Each center has a page that names it, so an entry can be cited and opened. This row read not readable until 20 August 2026 and it was wrong about the site, not about the HTML: the locator renders nothing without JavaScript, and the JSON behind it answers in full. |
| IKO | Kite | Readable | 24 Sep 2026 | 306 affiliated schools in 64 countries in one request. Two cautions, both bought here. IKO's own site claims more than 350 affiliated centers, so absence from the feed proves nothing. And the feed carries junk: a record named School plus test was in it on 20 August and gone the next day, which is why nothing here trusts a register row to be a real business without a page that names it. |
| VDWS | Kite, wing, windsurf | Readable | 21 Sep 2026 | 427 stations in 26 countries in one request, with an email for 420 and a website for 366, each with its own station page. Readable through the endpoint behind the finder, not through the finder, which serves one sport in one country and 404s for every other combination. |
| SDI / TDI / ERDI | Diving | Readable | 21 Aug 2026 | International Training answers a point and a radius rather than a whole register: facilities within a distance of a coordinate, up to 100 at a time, each with its city, its profile page and which of its brands the facility holds. 3 within 40 miles of Koh Tao, 5 of Phuket, 31 of Cozumel. Enough to check a claim and enough to list a place, which is what a location page needs. |
| Academy of Surfing Instructors | Surf, SUP | Readable | 15 Aug 2026 | 142 accredited schools with discipline and town, in plain HTML. 71 are in Australia, 20 in the UK, 16 in Ireland. Of the places in this directory it lists three. |
| Paddle UK | Paddling | Readable | 15 Aug 2026 | About 650 British clubs across 13 paginated pages. Clubs rather than businesses you book, and Britain only. |
| PADI | Diving | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | The shop locator returns 119 KB of markup and about 4 KB of text, and /dive-shops/thailand returns the same bytes as /dive-shops/nearby: the country is applied in your browser, never on the server. A shop profile is readable if you already know its store number, which is how the agency field gets filled, one business at a time. It is the largest body in this sport and the one that cannot be enumerated. |
| NAUI | Diving | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | 717 KB, no center names. |
| CMAS | Diving | Wrong kind of list | 15 Aug 2026 | Enumerates national federations, not dive centers. A register of registers. |
| FPS (Portugal) | Surf | Not readable | 14 Aug 2026 | Its school list points at escolasdesurf.pt, which did not resolve in DNS. The federation says it visited more than 170 schools for that project by 2022. Portugal is covered here through RNAAT instead, which is a license rather than a membership. |
| FFS (France) | Surf | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | Reports Total: 1 résultats trouvés and then contains no school name at all. The schools are drawn onto a map by JavaScript. |
| ABK (Brazil) | Kite | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | Accredits schools and issues instructor cards. Its site serves 46 characters of text to a real headless browser, and its former domain no longer resolves. |
| PCSSD (Philippines) | Diving | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | The Philippine Commission on Sports Scuba Diving accredits dive establishments by law, which is the same shape as CDWS. divephilippines.com.ph is a placeholder with no directory, and the Department of Tourism publishes no list of accredited shops we could find. The accreditation exists; the roll does not, and those are different findings. |
| Thailand (DOT and TAT) | All tourism | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | tourismcentre.go.th does not resolve in DNS, dot.go.th fails TLS verification, and the official thailandtourismdirectory.go.th returns 77 characters of text. Thai operators are licensed and print their TAT numbers themselves, and there is nowhere to check one. A license that exists and cannot be read is not the same as no license. |
| Greece (YNANP) | Diving | Not readable | 19 Sep 2026 | Law 3409/2005 makes anyone providing recreational diving services register through the port police directorate of the shipping ministry, renewed every five years with the local port authority, and Law 4688/2020 carried that forward. The register exists; the list does not come out. Both ynanp.gr and gov.gr answer a plain request with HTTP 403. Same shape as Thailand: a licence that exists and cannot be read. |
| Indonesia and Malaysia | Diving, tourism | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | POSSI refuses a plain request with 403. The Indonesian tourism ministry publishes no operator list. Malaysia's marine park directory serves 563 characters. Malaysia does publish its marine park fees, which is why the Tioman guide can quote them. |
| TSSF (Turkey) | Diving | Not readable | 20 Aug 2026 | A state authorisation register published through e-Devlet with no login, 284 authorised dive centers with printed expiry dates, and on paper the strongest European finding. It does not answer: the form renders, the token is where the route says, and in place of a table it prints Sistemde yaşanan bir teknik aksaklık nedeni ile işleminiz tamamlanamadı. Nothing is built on it, and nothing should be until it answers: a source that cannot be read cannot be checked either. |
| International Rafting Federation | Whitewater | Wrong kind of list | 15 Aug 2026 | About 50 national federations, well presented. A register of registers. |
| IWWF and WWA | Wakeboard | No list at all | 15 Aug 2026 | Marketing sites. Neither publishes a wake park or club list at any path we could find. |
| AIDA, Molchanovs | Freediving | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | Both serve shells with no school list. Freediving is covered here from SSI's own label field instead, which marks 1,515 of its centers as freediving centers, and that is what it says: SSI rates the center for its freediving program, not that anybody teaches it this season. |
| RYA, World Sailing | Sailing | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | The RYA course finder carries no centers; World Sailing lists national authorities. |
| ISA, Surfing England | Surf | Not readable | 15 Aug 2026 | ISA lists member nations. No club list found for Surfing England. |
| STA, coasteering and canyoning bodies | Swim, adventure | No list at all | 15 Aug 2026 | Nothing readable at any path tried. |
What a license proves and a membership does not
Portugal's is the one we hold whole and have written up separately: what an RNAAT licence proves, including where its licenses actually are and one claim we removed. The nine are not one kind of thing, and the difference decides what a page may say when a business is missing. RNAAT is a state licence, and CDWS membership is required by law for a licensed Egyptian dive centre: a business must hold one to trade, so absence from them is a fact about the business. Green Fins, SSI, IKO, VDWS and International Training are voluntary memberships, where absence means a business has not joined a scheme and nothing else at all. IKO is the clearest case, because its own site claims more affiliated centers than its feed carries, so its list is short by its own account.
Every location page here states which kind stands behind it, and every page built on a membership carries the sentence about absence in its opening lines. That sentence is the one that protects a business we do not list.
Two of the failures are governments, and one of them is a whole country
Worth separating out, because it changes what the pattern means. The PCSSD accreditation in the Philippines and the TAT license in Thailand are both legal obligations whose rolls cannot be read: the accreditation exists and the register does not answer. Turkey's TSSF register is published and returns a technical fault instead of its 284 centers. Portugal's RNAAT was in this paragraph until 21 August and has moved to the table above, which is what a correction looks like when it goes the good way.
This is not simply an industry declining to be listed. Where a school is required by law to hold something, we say so on its page and tell you to ask for it, because that question is worth more than any badge we could print.
What this means for the pages
It is why the directory has more than one kind of location page and labels each of them. A page built from a register can say every operator this register carries here, because it can. A page built from a license can say more, because absence is a finding. A page built from neither can only say the schools we found and read ourselves, and absence from it means we did not find a school rather than that a body does not list one.
Those four are Arugam Bay, Cumbuco, Hossegor and Taghazout, and on 21 August 2026 none of the nine readable sources carried a single business at any of them. Two places moved that day, in opposite directions. Cumbuco joined the four: IKO had listed one school there and stopped carrying it overnight, so the page lost the only register entry it had. Mui Ne left them, because IKO does list one of the six schools already on that page, which had been sitting in the feed unread while the page said no register could be enumerated.
If you run a governing body and this is wrong, we would like it to be: write to us and we will recheck it and date the correction. If a body starts publishing a readable list, the pages that depend on it change with it, and this page says so on the day it happens.
Sources
- The registers this page judges, each at the address it was read from. SSI training-centre locator, IKO school register, VDWS station register, Green Fins member register, CDWS Egypt, RNAAT via Turismo de Portugal open data, International Training (SDI, TDI) and PADI, which is judged here on its terms rather than its mechanics.
- Every verdict in the table is a reading on the date beside it, taken with the same tools that build this directory. A register that answers today may not tomorrow, and two of the rows in this table have already changed once for that reason.
- How we work: editorial standards.