Effective date: May 13, 2026 Version: 2 Applies to: Anyone who uses mantaradive.com or related MantaraDive content, search, and referral services.
1. Who we are
MantaraDive is an independent dive-travel publisher and referral platform operated by Frank Zhang, doing business as MantaraDive, with an operating address in Hong Kong. "MantaraDive," "we," "us," and "our" refer to this operator. "You" refers to the visitor using mantaradive.com or any related service.
You can reach us at service@mantaradive.com for any question about these Terms or about how the site works.
2. What MantaraDive does
MantaraDive curates editorial content, guides, comparisons, and search tools about liveaboards, dive resorts, and dive destinations. When you decide to book, we connect you with independent third-party operators — liveaboards, resorts, insurance providers, and similar businesses — through affiliate links or referral handoffs.
MantaraDive does not:
- own or operate any dive boat, resort, or in-water service;
- hold trip inventory, cabins, rooms, or departure dates as a principal;
- collect or process customer payment for any trip;
- act as a travel agent, tour operator, seller of travel, or merchant of record for booked trips.
The operator you ultimately book with is responsible for delivering your trip, taking your payment, issuing receipts, and handling cancellations and refunds under its own terms. We may receive a referral commission or platform fee from that operator, disclosed under section 6 below.
3. Editorial content and "no advice" disclaimer
Our articles, destination guides, comparisons, season tables, and recommendations are editorial opinion and travel journalism. They are written for general information and inspiration. They are not:
- professional travel advice;
- medical, fitness, or dive-safety advice;
- legal, tax, immigration, or insurance advice;
- a guarantee of price, availability, conditions, or quality at any operator.
Conditions in the field change constantly. Weather, marine life sightings, visibility, currents, operator schedules, prices, certifications required, and entry rules are decided by external parties and can shift between the time we publish and the time you travel. Always verify the specifics directly with the operator and with current government and dive-medical sources before committing.
4. Your responsibilities as a traveler and diver
When you use MantaraDive to plan or book, you confirm that you are responsible for:
- holding the certifications, logged dives, fitness level, and medical clearance the operator requires;
- carrying valid passports, visas, entry forms, and any health documents the destination requires;
- following the operator's safety briefings, dive plans, marine-park rules, and local laws;
- buying suitable travel and dive insurance, including coverage for diving accidents, evacuation, and trip interruption;
- disclosing relevant medical conditions, dietary needs, and equipment needs to the operator before the trip.
Operators may refuse to take you diving if they believe you are unsafe, under-certified, medically unfit, intoxicated, or non-compliant with their rules. Those decisions are made by the operator, not MantaraDive.
4A. Age and capacity to use the service
You must be at least 16 years old to use MantaraDive or submit any inquiry through the site. If you are under 16, please ask a parent or legal guardian to use the service on your behalf. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16 (EU/UK), under 13 (US/CA — see COPPA, PIPEDA), or below the digital-consent age set by your local law.
By using the site you confirm you have the legal capacity to enter into a contract under the laws of your country of residence.
5. Bookings, payments, and refunds happen with the operator
When you click through to an operator from MantaraDive, your booking, payment, contract, and refund terms are governed by that operator's published terms — not by MantaraDive. Read those terms before you pay.
Because MantaraDive does not handle the money, we cannot directly refund a trip you bought from an operator. If you need a refund or change, follow the operator's process and their published cancellation policy. Our separate Refund Policy explains how we try to help when something goes wrong with a trip you booked through a MantaraDive referral link.
6. Affiliate and commission disclosure
In line with US FTC Endorsement Guides (16 C.F.R. Part 255), UK CMA / ASA CAP Code rules on affiliate marketing, the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) and Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) advertising-transparency provisions, the Competition Act and Competition Bureau Influencer Marketing Guidelines (Canada), and the Hong Kong Trade Descriptions Ordinance (Cap. 362), we disclose that MantaraDive earns referral commissions, affiliate revenue, or a future platform fee from many of the operators, insurance providers, and booking platforms we link to. We currently target a 20% platform fee for trips booked through future MantaraDive checkout flows; today, most links are standard affiliate links to operators or partners such as DiveAssure.
We try to recommend operators on editorial merit, not on commission size. Where commercial relationships could reasonably affect a recommendation, we say so on the page.
7. Intellectual property
The MantaraDive name, logo, written articles, photography, illustrations, comparison tables, search tooling, and overall site design are owned by MantaraDive or our licensors. You may read, share, and quote short excerpts with attribution and a link back. You may not republish full articles, copy substantial portions of our content, scrape the site at scale, train machine-learning models on our content, or resell MantaraDive content without our prior written permission.
Text and data mining opt-out. MantaraDive expressly reserves all rights under Article 4 of the EU CDSM Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/790) and equivalent UK and other regimes. This page, the sitemap, and the underlying HTML are intended as a machine-readable reservation against commercial text- and data-mining and AI-training use of our content. Any commercial mining, scraping, or training use requires our prior written consent.
Third-party trademarks — operator names, resort names, liveaboard names, and operator imagery belong to those parties and are used only nominatively to identify and describe their services. Such use does not imply endorsement, partnership, or sponsorship by those parties unless we explicitly say so.
User-submitted content. If you send us a trip inquiry, comment, photo, review, or any other material ("User Content"), you confirm you have the right to do so and you grant MantaraDive a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publish, and display that User Content for the purpose of operating, marketing, and improving the service. You retain ownership of your User Content. You may ask us to remove User Content you submitted by writing to service@mantaradive.com.
Copyright complaints (DMCA / equivalent). If you believe content on MantaraDive infringes your copyright, send a written notice to service@mantaradive.com including (1) identification of the copyrighted work, (2) the URL of the allegedly infringing material, (3) your contact information, (4) a statement of good-faith belief, (5) a statement under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate and you are the rights holder or authorised agent, and (6) your physical or electronic signature. We respond to valid notices under the US DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 512), the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the EU Digital Services Act notice-and-action mechanism (Art. 16), the Hong Kong Copyright Ordinance (Cap. 528), and the Canadian Copyright Act notice-and-notice regime, as applicable. Misuse of the notice process may expose the sender to liability.
8. Acceptable use
You agree not to use MantaraDive to:
- copy, scrape, or republish content beyond fair-use / fair-dealing quoting with attribution;
- submit false inquiries, spam our inbox, or impersonate another person or operator;
- attempt to break, probe, or overload the site, its APIs, or its hosting infrastructure (including DoS, credential stuffing, automated probing, or any activity that would violate the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the UK Computer Misuse Act 1990, the EU NIS2 framework, the HK Crimes Ordinance §161, or Canadian Criminal Code §342.1);
- collect personal data of other visitors or operators in violation of GDPR, UK GDPR, the Hong Kong PDPO, PIPEDA, or US state privacy laws;
- use the site or its outputs to train commercial generative-AI systems without our prior written permission.
We may suspend access, remove submissions, or block traffic that we believe violates these rules.
9. No warranty
MantaraDive is provided "as is" and "as available." To the maximum extent allowed by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, non-infringement, and uninterrupted availability. We do not warrant that:
- the site will be error-free, accurate, complete, or current;
- any operator linked from MantaraDive will be available, safe, solvent, or honor its own terms;
- pricing, dates, inclusions, or itinerary details on the site match the operator's actual offer at booking time.
Nothing in this section limits any warranty or right you have under applicable consumer-protection law that cannot legally be waived — including statutory rights under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, the EU Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU) and Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Directive (93/13/EEC), the Hong Kong Sale of Goods Ordinance (Cap. 26) and Control of Exemption Clauses Ordinance (Cap. 71), the Canadian Consumer Protection Acts of the user's province, and US state consumer-protection laws.
10. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent allowed by law, MantaraDive, its operator, and its contributors are not liable for:
- any act, omission, negligence, insolvency, or failure of any third-party operator, insurer, payment processor, or booking platform;
- injury, illness, death, decompression illness, equipment damage, missed flights, weather disruption, marine-park closures, or other risks inherent in diving and international travel;
- indirect, incidental, consequential, special, punitive, or lost-opportunity damages;
- losses you could have recovered from an operator, insurer, bank, or card issuer.
If a court finds us liable despite this section, our total liability for any claim arising from your use of MantaraDive is capped at the greater of (a) the total commission MantaraDive actually received from the relevant booking, or (b) USD 100.
Nothing in this section excludes or limits our liability for: (i) death or personal injury caused by our negligence; (ii) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; (iii) any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited under the law that applies to you — including consumer rights under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, EU consumer-protection law, the HK Control of Exemption Clauses Ordinance, and applicable Canadian and US state consumer-protection statutes.
11. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. You and MantaraDive agree to try to resolve any dispute informally first by writing to service@mantaradive.com and allowing 30 days for a good-faith response.
If the dispute is not resolved informally, it will be heard exclusively by the courts located in Hong Kong, except that either party may bring a qualifying small-claim in the consumer's local court where local consumer-protection law requires that option — including the protective jurisdiction rules of the Brussels I bis Regulation (EU 1215/2012, Arts. 17–19) for EU consumers, the equivalent UK consumer-jurisdiction rules under the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982 (as retained), and any non-waivable forum protections under the consumer-protection laws of California, Quebec, or the user's home jurisdiction.
Each party waives any right to participate in a class action, collective action, or representative proceeding to the extent permitted by law. This class-action waiver does not apply where local law (including EU collective-redress mechanisms under Directive (EU) 2020/1828, UK Group Litigation Orders, and US state laws that void class-action waivers in consumer contracts) renders such a waiver unenforceable.
12. Privacy and data subject rights
Our handling of personal information is described in our separate Privacy Policy. By using MantaraDive you agree to that policy. Submitting an inquiry, newsletter signup, or trip request means we may share the relevant details with the operator and with our email and analytics processors as needed to respond to you.
Your rights. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, port, restrict the processing of, object to the processing of, or delete the personal data we hold about you, and to withdraw consent. These rights derive from regimes including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Arts. 15–22), the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, the Hong Kong Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA, Canada) and any applicable provincial law (e.g., Quebec Law 25), and US state privacy laws including the California Consumer Privacy Act / CPRA, the Colorado Privacy Act, the Virginia CDPA, the Connecticut CTDPA, and equivalents that come into force in your state.
How to exercise them. Email service@mantaradive.com from the address on file with the subject line "Privacy Request" and tell us what you want. We will acknowledge within 5 business days and respond substantively within the deadline set by the law that applies to you (commonly 30 days under GDPR / UK GDPR, 45 days under CCPA — both extendable in limited circumstances; 40 days under the HK PDPO; up to 30 days under PIPEDA). We may need to verify your identity before disclosing or deleting data; reasonable verification does not pause the clock.
International transfers. If you contact us from outside Hong Kong, your personal data may be processed in Hong Kong or in the regions of our processors. Where transfer-mechanism rules apply (EU/UK Standard Contractual Clauses and UK Addendum / IDTA for transfers to non-adequate jurisdictions), we will rely on them.
Cookies and analytics. The site uses cookies and similar technologies for essential functionality and, where permitted, analytics. Where the law in your jurisdiction (e.g., EU ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC as implemented, UK PECR) requires prior consent, our cookie banner offers opt-in.
13. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms when our service changes, when new partners or jurisdictions are added, or when law requires it. The version in effect when you use the site is the version published at the URL https://www.mantaradive.com/legal/terms. For changes that materially reduce your rights or increase your obligations, we will use reasonable means to notify you (such as a site banner or an email to subscribed users) at least 30 days before the change takes effect, where practical. Continued use of the site after the change takes effect indicates acceptance; if you do not accept, please stop using the service.
14. Severability and entire agreement
If any provision of these Terms is held to be unenforceable in any jurisdiction, the remaining provisions remain in full force in that jurisdiction, and the offending provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted by law. These Terms (together with the Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, and any other policy referenced on the site) are the entire agreement between you and MantaraDive with respect to your use of the site, and supersede any prior oral or written communication on that subject.
15. Contact
Questions, complaints, or legal notices should go to service@mantaradive.com. We try to respond to every legitimate message within five business days.
For privacy / data-subject requests, please use the subject line "Privacy Request" so we can route it under our DSAR process (see §12).