Deep-sea diving & cyber surfing

One thing about Americans is that they love the Internet and they get in touch with someone from across the globe by e-mail. You can’t expect them to text you or to wake up in the middle of the night in California to make an expensive telephone call just so they can catch you during your working hours in Manila.

So when Dave Allen — a diver, underwater videographer, blogger and writer for scubamagazine.net — was about to bring to the Philippines a group of 15 divers, he e-mailed 14 different resorts in the Philippines to inquire about packages.

Not one of them responded for two weeks.

Only three resorts e-mailed back later — and one of them was on an island where there was no Internet. Finally, Planet Dive in Anilao responded and as a result got the business and free publicity. Dave had traveled with the group and with a GMA-7 film crew from the show Born to Be Wild.  

Dave shoots high-definition videos and uploads them on about 50 file-sharing sites, which spreads to about a hundred in a year. He says that for divers, videos are very important because they want to see the marine life as it is now — not what it was 30 years ago like, say, on a resort’s website photos.

Dave is also part of the Philippine Paradise Divers Group, a community that’s also on facebook.com. A former quality control manager for aerospace, he now shoots and produces high-def videos for dive sites around the world for a living. But for the Philippines and its resorts, “I do not charge anything. It’s my way of giving back to them. The Philippines has been a good friend and ally to the US and I hope the US is a good friend in return.”

As a diver, he says he has gotten so much from the country. “There’s a fascinating discovery at every dive. I get excited about running across little strange animals. When I was in Escaya Resort in Panglao, I ran into two small decorator crabs — it was amazing.”

Dive videos, he says, are viewed tens of thousands of times on the Internet and he qualifies that “views” are much better than “hits.”

In this age of blogging and countries without boundaries, Team North America has gotten on with the times as well. Two years ago, they acquired a massive database of Filipino Americans when they launched the website www.experience philippines.ph with a promotion that gave away 250 roundtrip tickets from the US to the Philippines. Last year, they gave away a P5 million condo unit at St. Francis Tower in the Shangri-La Plaza complex on EDSA (a Fil-Canadian won it). They also have a 24-hour number that North Americans can call and it is manned by tour guides in the Philippines. 

“This year we are concentrating on the selling part,” says Team North America head Junjun Jorda-Apo. “We’ve advertised on Yahoo as well — a 30-second video ad on diving and another one on wellness.”

They also selected 1,300 travel agents in the US to undergo online training about the Philippines so they can sell the country better. About 150 select agents, those with the biggest potential to sell, were sent on fam tours around the country.

It seems that the best way to catch these people who are so passionate about being underwater is in cyberspace.