The two departures that serve the Side hotel belt
Two of our five boats leave from inside the area most Side guests stay in, which makes the transfer leg short at both ends of the day:
- Kumköy — our six-hour day, €43. The gentlest and shortest trip we run, and the nearest departure for the big Kumköy hotel cluster.
- Side — the seven-hour Underwater Museum day, €45, over roughly 110 sunken sculptures at about 12 metres.
The belt these two serve stretches along the coast either side of the Side peninsula: Side itself, Kumköy, Evrenseki and Çolaklı, plus the resort strips at Sorgun, Titreyengöl and Kızılağaç. If you are staying anywhere along it, we collect you and drop you back, both ways, at no extra cost — the transfer is part of the price on every trip we run. Our pages for diving from Side and diving from Kumköy set out what the day looks like from each of those two starting points.
Why transfer time changes how the whole day feels
Guests focus on the price and the dive sites, and then discover that the thing that shaped their day was the minibus. A transfer is never a straight line from your hotel to the harbour: the driver runs a round, collecting from several hotels in sequence, so the further the boat is from you, the earlier that round starts and the longer you sit in it.
Short transfer, in practice, means a later pickup, arriving at the boat awake rather than half-asleep, children still in a good mood when the kit comes out, and getting home while the afternoon is still worth something. Long transfer means an early start and, on the way back, the drowsy hour after diving spent in a seat rather than by the pool.
That is why the closest boat is genuinely the right answer for a lot of Side guests, and why the Kumköy diving trip at €43 does well with families and first-timers. If your hotel sits at the eastern or western end of the belt, the details are on our Evrenseki and Çolaklı pages.
Choosing between the two close boats — and when to travel anyway
If both departures are near you, the choice comes down to what you want from the water. Take Kumköy if the priority is a short, easy day: six hours, the lowest price, less time at sea with children or nervous first-timers. Take the museum day if you came for the sculptures — one extra hour, €2 more, groups of 3–4 divers per instructor, and fish that come to be hand-fed. Both include two guided dives, all equipment, lunch on board, insurance and the full briefing.
And there are honest reasons to accept a longer drive. Kemer, at eight hours and €43, has the clearest water on this coast, with reef fish, rock formations and octopus often spotted — and it is wreck country, with the Paris II lying at 21–31 metres and the Three Islands and Lighthouse tunnel at 9 metres. Antalya, eight hours and €50, is where the DO-28 aircraft wreck sits at 19.5–23.3 metres. Both wrecks are firmly certified-diver territory, never a discovery dive. If you hold a certification and came to dive properly, the extra road time buys something real — see the whole line-up on our tours page.
