We don't sell the Andamans the way most agencies do — as a beach holiday with diving as a side activity. We run the Andamans as a diving holiday with beaches as the connective tissue. The difference matters because it determines everything: where you stay, when you go, which boat you go on, and whether you come back as someone who saw a reef from a glass-bottomed boat or someone with a card in their wallet that says they can dive to 18 metres anywhere in the world for the rest of their life.
The trip we run most often is the eight-night trail with the PADI Open Water certification built in. You arrive in Port Blair as a non-diver. You leave with a logbook of four dives, an open-water cert, and (typically) one fun-dive on Neil Island to put the certification to immediate use. This piece is the version of that trip we ran in February of last year.
The shape of the eight nights
Night 1: Port Blair. Cellular Jail in the late afternoon (it closes at 4:30 p.m. — the sound-and-light show is genuinely worth staying for). Dinner at a fish place run by a Bengali family who've been in the islands for two generations.
Nights 2–6: Havelock. The four-night Open Water course runs across days 2–4. You are exhausted by the end of day three. Day five is a rest day on Radhanagar beach. Day six is the qualifying day — two dives that count toward the certification, with depth.
Nights 7–8: Neil Island. Smaller, quieter, the antidote to Havelock's diver hustle. One fun dive at Bus Stop or Margherita's Mischief, one slow afternoon, the road from Bharatpur to Lakshmanpur on a bicycle, an early flight back via Port Blair.
This works. It compresses the trip enough that travellers don't lose momentum, but leaves enough beach for the non-divers in the family.
The PADI Open Water — what it actually involves
The certification is four days of work. Day one is theory and pool-equivalent work in the shallows of the resort beach — neutral buoyancy, mask clearing, regulator recovery. By day two you're in open water at four metres. Day three: 12 metres. Day four: 18 metres. The Open Water card is good for 18 metres anywhere, for life.
Our PADI Course Director partner runs the school we use. He's been a PADI instructor since 2009 and a Course Director (the qualification that lets you train other instructors) since 2017. He's signed off something like 4,000 students. The reason we work with him is not the qualification — it's the temperament. Diving instruction goes wrong when an instructor pushes a student through a panic moment they shouldn't push through. He won't. His sign-off rate is around 91%, which means roughly 1 in 10 students don't complete the course on the first attempt — and that is the right rate. Schools with sign-off rates above 98% are usually rushing people through.
We brief travellers on this before they book. If you've never been below the surface and you're nervous about water, a "discovery" half-day — a single shallow guided dive without certification — is a better first step. Discovery costs around ₹6,000. The full Open Water at our partner school is ₹26,000 for the four days. The discovery counts as day one if you decide later to continue.
Havelock vs Neil — the real comparison
People ask us which island is better. The answer is both, in this order.
Havelock is the diving island. Three good operators, ten or eleven serious dive sites within an hour's boat-ride, and the infrastructure (compressors, oxygen, hyperbaric backup at Port Blair) that means a serious dive operation is possible. Radhanagar Beach is on the west coast — sunset, white sand, no rocks. Vijaynagar beach on the east is where the smaller hotels sit. The downside: Havelock is busy, the road is potholed, and the central beach area gets a generic resort-strip feel in peak season.
Neil is what Havelock was twelve years ago. Slower, smaller, two and a half hours by ferry from Havelock. The diving is good — Bus Stop, Margherita's Mischief, K-Rock — but the operator base is smaller and we wouldn't run an Open Water cert there because the redundancy isn't the same. For a fun-dive on Neil after you're already certified, it's beautiful. For your first descent, Havelock.
We'd argue the eight-night split (five Havelock, two Neil, one Port Blair) is right for first-timers. Repeat travellers sometimes flip it: three Havelock, four Neil. We'll plan either.
The reef doesn't owe you anything. It rewards the people who showed up to learn, not just to look.
Boats, weather, and the season
The Andaman season runs mid-October through mid-May. May to mid-October is the southwest monsoon, the seas are too rough for serious diving, and most operators close. Visibility peaks in December through March at 25–30 metres on a good day. April gets warmer and the water hits 30°C — comfortable, but the bigger pelagic fish move deeper.
The ferry between Port Blair and Havelock is the Makruzz or the Green Ocean (1.5–2 hours). We book the front section because the back of these boats can get rolly even in calm seas. Government ferries are cheaper but cancel without notice, and we don't use them on a tight itinerary. From Havelock to Neil it's another 1–1.5 hours. Inter-island ferries do not run if the seas are above a certain threshold; we've had two trips in the last decade where weather forced us to skip Neil and add an extra Havelock day. We brief for this possibility at booking.
Where you stay
Havelock: Taj Exotica is the obvious choice (and yes, expensive). We've been using it since it opened in 2018 and it has held its standards. For travellers who want something more grounded, Barefoot at Havelock — the original eco-resort on the island, owner-run, on a stretch of forest by the beach. For divers who want simple-and-good without the price tag, Wild Orchid (now SeaShell). All three are within 15 minutes of our dive base.
Neil: Munjoh Ocean Resort is the best of a smaller list. Beachfront, well-run, the food is properly local, and the manager has been there since 2014.
Port Blair: one night, no need for luxury. We use SeaShell Port Blair or Fortune Resort Bay Island for the night before the early flight out.
What about non-diving family members?
Roughly a third of our Andaman travellers come as couples or families where one person dives and one doesn't. The non-diver's trip is good. Radhanagar is one of the better beaches in Asia, the bicycle ride on Neil is genuinely lovely, and the snorkeling at Elephant Beach (Havelock) and Lakshmanpur Beach (Neil) is excellent — you don't need a certification for the surface life of the reef. We plan the diver's days alongside the non-diver's days so families overlap at meals and beach evenings, even if the days diverge.
What we don't tell you in the brochure
Three things.
One: the Andamans are not the Maldives. People sometimes book this as an India equivalent of an overwater-villa trip and then are surprised that the resorts are forest-edge bungalows, the roads are potholed, the power cuts out occasionally, and the food is honest-and-good rather than international-fine-dining. The marine life is comparable to the Maldives or better in places. The infrastructure is not. Calibrate.
Two: the indigenous-tribe situation is real and you don't go near it. The Sentinelese and Jarawa tribes live in protected areas of the archipelago. Tour operators that offer "tribal tours" or drive-throughs of the Jarawa reserve are operating illegally and unethically. Don't book with anyone who offers them. We won't run them and we'll ask you not to either.
Three: dive certification is real work. The eight-night cert trip is not a holiday in the lounging sense. Days two through five involve four hours of pool work, three hours of theory, two open-water dives a day, and an exam at the end of day four. People sometimes book this thinking they'll dive in the morning and bask on the beach in the afternoon. The basking comes after the cert, not during it. If a soft holiday is what you want, we'll plan you a non-diving Andamans trip where the snorkeling does the heavy lifting and there's no cert in the picture.
If you want the certification — and you've understood the work — write to us. We'll talk you through the medical, the dates, and which week of February or March is the right one for the trip you want.