The two sports the island is actually good at
Zanzibar sells a lot of activities. Two of them are the reason people come back: learning to kitesurf on the shallow east-coast flats, and learning to dive on the northern reefs. They suit different coasts, different water, and — more than most people expect — different budgets.
Both are also sold with a particular kind of vagueness. A price is quoted without saying how many hours it buys, or whether you are sharing an instructor, or what the certification fee costs on top. Those omissions are where the difference between two apparently similar quotes actually lives.
What our price pages do
Each page collects what the schools and dive centres publish themselves, from their own price lists, and states the date we read each one. Nothing on them is a market estimate or an average of what people say online: if we could not find a figure on an operator’s own published list, it is not there.
Two things those pages make visible that a quote usually does not.
What the number buys. A course price means little without its hours and its group size. The pages separate private tuition from shared, because they are different products sold under one name, and quoting a single band hides that — an error we made ourselves once and logged rather than quietly fixed.
What we cannot yet tell you. Our own price history is short. Where we do not yet know whether published rates move with the season, the page says so, with the date our record starts, instead of implying a pattern we have not observed.
Reading the two together
The choice between them is often really a choice of coast, because the sports live on different sides of the island — which makes this pillar and where to stay the same decision approached from two directions.
The method behind every figure is on how we price; what we have not been able to verify is in our open questions register.