Why No Register Stands Behind These Pages
Our dive pages say what an independent assessor found. Our kite, surf and windsurf pages say what the school says about itself, and they say so at the top of every page. This is the working behind that difference: eighteen governing bodies and state registers tried, four readable, and none of the four covers the places those pages are about.
What "readable" means here
One thing only: can a list of operators be retrieved in bulk by an ordinary client, so that a page can honestly claim to show everyone a body carries? Not whether the body is respectable, not whether its standards are good. Several of the failures below are serious organisations doing real work. They simply do not publish a list anyone can read.
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, and it is why each row below says what the request actually returned instead of just "no".
The eighteen, and what each returned
| Body | Sport | Verdict | What it returned |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green Fins | Diving | Readable | 360 members worldwide with membership tier and whether an assessor visited in person. Every dive page here is built on it. |
| CDWS (Egypt) | Diving, watersports | Readable | Egypt’s Chamber of Diving and Water Sports, and a statutory one: a dive centre has to be a member to operate legally. Its register lists 313 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. |
| Academy of Surfing Instructors | Surf, SUP | Readable | 142 accredited schools with discipline and town, in plain HTML. 71 are in Australia, 20 in the UK, 16 in Ireland. Of the 48 places in this directory it lists three. |
| Paddle UK | Paddling | Readable | About 650 British clubs across 13 paginated pages. Clubs rather than businesses you book, and Britain only. |
| VDWS | Kite, wing, windsurf | Not readable | Serves exactly one server-rendered listing page, for one sport in one country, and 404s for every other combination. |
| IKO | Kite | Not readable | The school finder loads 168 KB containing no school links. Its per-school pages return an Android WebView error instead of a school. |
| PADI | Diving | Not readable | 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 we fill the agency field. |
| SSI | Diving | Not readable | Same shape as PADI at two different paths. |
| SDI / TDI | Diving | Not readable | 158 KB of search page with no centre names in it. |
| NAUI | Diving | Not readable | 717 KB, no centre names. |
| CMAS | Diving | Wrong kind of list | Enumerates national federations, not dive centres. |
| FPS (Portugal) | Surf | Not readable | Its school list points at escolasdesurf.pt, which did not resolve in DNS on 14 August 2026. The federation says it visited more than 170 schools for that project by 2022. |
| RNAAT (Portugal, state) | All tourism | Not readable | The state register of tourism operators. Its public search is an application that returns no records to anything but a real browser: no submit control and no postback targets in the served HTML. |
| FFS (France) | Surf | Not readable | 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 | 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 | The Philippine Commission on the Development and Promotion of Sports Scuba Diving accredits dive establishments by law, which is the same shape as CDWS. Its site, divephilippines.com.ph, is a placeholder with no directory, and the Department of Tourism publishes no list of accredited dive shops we could find. The accreditation exists; the roll does not. |
| Thailand (DOT and TAT) | All tourism | Not readable | 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. Our Thai records carry TAT licence numbers the operators publish themselves, and there is nowhere to check them. |
| Indonesia and Malaysia | Diving, tourism | Not readable | 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. |
| International Rafting Federation | Whitewater | Wrong kind of list | About 50 national federations, well presented. A register of registers. |
| IWWF and WWA | Wakeboard | No list at all | Marketing sites. Neither publishes a wake park or club list at any path we could find. |
| AIDA, Molchanovs | Freediving | Not readable | Both serve shells with no school list. |
| RYA, World Sailing | Sailing | Not readable | The RYA course finder carries no centres; World Sailing lists national authorities. |
| ISA, Surfing England | Surf | Not readable | ISA lists member nations. No club list found for Surfing England. |
| STA, coasteering and canyoning bodies | Swim, adventure | No list at all | Nothing readable at any path tried. |
Two of the failures are governments
Worth separating out, because it changes what the pattern means. Portugal's RNAAT and the Catalan authorisation for diving in the Illes Medes are both state instruments, and both are documented obligations whose rolls we could not read. 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 the reason the directory has two kinds of location page and labels them differently. A register page can say "every operator the register carries", because it can. A found page 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.
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.