As a PADI Dive Master, do you believe you need to purchase the insurance? While I certainly buy into paying the PADI dues to help support the society. Is the insurance required if you do not plan to teach or act as a dive master?
If it was me I would carry the insurance. Since you have the Divemaster card and are keeping it current if an accident happened and you were there if they decided to sue you could be named (of course they would have to know you were a Divemaster). So it's not that you would loose in a suit as you weren't participating in that capacity, but you would have the expense of having to hire your own Lawyer to defend yourself which can get rather expensive.
They also use to offer Retired status insurance which was less expensive.
Your call but, I would.
You can get sued whether or not you are a dive master and yes if you had it it would cover your lawyer fees.
If you don't plan on acting as a dive master or assisting an instructor I think you would be better off softening up your hard earned cash for butt wipe. (that is just my opinion and anything I say can and will be used against me
) I do not plan on purchasing the annual insurance or dues as I do not want to lead dives in the Caribbean or whatnot and I do not plan on getting rich by helping an instructor teach scuba. I just took the class for the experience and the knowledge base.
I think that even after being a "non supporting member" meaning I chose not to
Put
Another
Dollar
In for a number of years, that you can then pay your annual dues, pay the insurance, and then get filthy rich leading dives with sunburned, rusty, arrogant, tourists in some out of the way island. (obviously kidding on getting filthy rich)
If you took the divemaster class to become an instructor or paid divemaster, then I would not hesitate to get the insurance. I think the insurance and the dues is about $350 per year if I am not mistaken. That is about the price of a brand spanken' new steel HP 120... per year.
If you pay the dues and get into the system, any tourist or student that had a bad day on one of your dives can contact PADI and PADI can do an investigation and pull your status as divemaster. This would be unlikely but it is a possibility. If they did pull your status, you probably needed it for one reason or another.
Personal insurance like DAN is important and I realize it is not the same thing but that is the only insurance I personally would get in my circumstance. Everyone is different and has different needs.
I chose not to renew my Instructors Certification and Liability Insurance this past year. Since I mainly teach private lessons or through Community Education classes, it has been rather slow the past 18 months.
I did receive and complete the PADI survey recently for those choosing not to renew, the survey covered a wide variety of issue and reasons for not renewing that you were given the opportunity to choose from. In addition to business being quite slow, the main reason that I did not renew is the darn liability insurnace. I figured that I had to have at least 8-10 students just to cover my costs of license renewal and liability insurnace.
Funny though, or at least I thought it was a little sad, but part of the survey had a lot to do with PADI stroking its ego.