Who can be listed
Surf schools, coastal and open water swimming clubs, water safety training providers, and individual outdoor instructors and coaches working on a coastline or in open water.
What has to be disclosed
Every fact below is published in the entry, and every one of them is something a reader can check independently. We do not verify them for you and we say so on the register itself.
- Registered or trading name, and company or charity number where one exists.
- The coastline, beaches or waters the organisation operates on.
- The qualification body and the specific award held, where an award applies to the activity.
- Whether public liability insurance is in place, and the name of the insurer, where insurance applies to the activity.
- A named contact with a role.
- Written agreement to these standards and to the statement that a listing is not an endorsement.
Our rates
These are our own published prices for our own services. They are the only prices on this site.
Prices are exclusive of VAT where VAT applies. They change no more than once a year and the page is dated when they do.
What the money cannot buy
Published in full, because a rate card without this list means nothing.
- Position. The register is alphabetical and stays alphabetical.
- A mention in an article. Not once, not in passing, not as an example.
- A link from editorial. There are no commercial links in the editorial on this site at all, for anybody, at any price.
- A rating, a badge, a seal or the word approved. None exist here.
- Sight of anything before it publishes. No previews, no approvals, no embargo courtesy.
- Removal of accurate material. Including material a listed organisation dislikes.
- Influence over subjects. We write about what we decide to write about.
- The mailing list. Subscriber addresses are never shared, sold or rented, and never to a sponsor.
- Category exclusivity. We do not stop covering a subject because somebody paid.
What we refuse to list at any price
Also published, because a refusal list is the only thing that makes an acceptance list mean anything.
- Anyone selling, supplying or promoting a sun protection product, a cosmetic, a supplement or a tanning service. This manual does not name products and will not take money from the people who make them.
- Anyone who will not disclose the qualification body and award behind a claimed qualification, where the activity has one.
- Anyone who claims a qualification, an accreditation or an insurance status we can see is not what they say it is on the awarding body's own public record.
- Anyone offering unsupervised open water sessions for children, or advertising in a way that plays down water risk.
- Anyone whose marketing makes health claims about sun exposure, tanning or vitamin D that they cannot point to a public health source for.
- Anyone who asks for a rating, a badge, a top position, a favourable mention, or a change to these standards as a condition of paying.
- Anyone who asks us to remove or soften something accurate.
A refusal is a refusal of a listing, not a judgement on the organisation, and we do not publish the names of anyone we have refused.
Refunds
If we refuse an application after payment, the payment is returned in full. If we remove an entry because a disclosed fact turns out to be untrue, the remainder of the term is returned.