DIVE (Excerpt Presenting the Winners of the 2021 DIVE Travel Awards)
108 different destinations, 245 liveaboards and more than 750 different dive centres and resorts. In total almost 17,000 individual nominations! DIVE readers have voted on the most popular diving destinations, resort/scentres and liveaboards
Our annual dive travel awards have gone from strength to strength and in their fifth year have attracted a record number of voters. From all over the world divers have picked their favourites - and their choices reveal the depth and spread of excellence in the dive travel industry.
Our poll shows the loyalty many divers have for their favourite operators both on land and in liveaboards. It also shows the sheer scale of the dive industry in Indonesia; with so much excellent diving it is only to be expected that there are so many excellent operators spread across the vast archipelago.
Check out the Top 10 winners in each category. There are plenty of previous winners and some interesting newcomers. We would like to thank all our voters for supporting the dive travel industry, particularly in these difficult Covid-19 times. And we all look forward to returning to our favourite destinations and operators next year!
Indonesia takes the top spot for the fifth consecutive year. While we can't say that this was entirely unexpected, we also can't say that it is entirely undeserved. Indonesia is the world's largest island nation, and it it is the beating heart of the Coral Triangle with a wealth of biodiversity.
During the DIVE Travel Awards, many people nominate individual locations as their favourite destinations, rather than the nation as a whole. We have to round these up under the umbrella of the country to prevent Indonesian regions from taking up all the top spots on the table, but this year we have been able to look at the regional breakdown more closely.
Raja Ampat was, by far and away, the most popular region in Indonesia, followed by Komodo, Bali (including the Nusa Islands) and North Sulawesi (including Lembeh and Bunaken National Park), with the Gili Islands in fifth place. Each has its own individual character (and, indeed, could be broken down even further), but with so much to see and do across all of them, it's no surprise that Indonesia takes its much-deserved crown once more.
Egypt retains the second place it has held each year since 2019, and while that may not, on the surface, indicate much progress, it has taken the position with a significantly larger percentage of the vote than at any other time in the past. From a total of 108 different destinations - after being collated into countries, that is - Egypt took just under 17 per cent of the overall vote, more than half of Indonesia's 30 per cent.
Egypt's success is all the more remarkable given that prior to the pandemic, the nation was still recovering from a massive drop in tourism over the preceding four years. The country's success in recent years is partly due to the outstanding loyalty of its visitors who, year after year, return to diving hotspots in Sharm El Sheikh, Hurghada, Dahab and Marsa Alam - plus a wide range of excellent liveaboard itineraries - to dive in the deep blue Red Sea.
Egypt is the birthplace of many a love affair with scuba diving. It has a mixture of everything from entry-level easy to advanced and challenging, slack currents to high-energy drifts, macro critters to pelagic visitors, all just a short hop from most of mainland Europe. Part of Egypt's attraction is undoubtedly its convenient location - but only a part, the rest belongs to the environment and the well-oiled machine of its scuba diving business.
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