Help · Waivers
A waiver is not an intake form
Side Quest Booking keeps these as two separate things, and it is worth two minutes to understand why, because picking the wrong one is the single most common setup mistake.
The difference in one line
An intake form is answered. A waiver is answered and signed.
An intake form is for things you need to know
Arrival and departure dates, wetsuit size, fin size, whether they need to borrow a mask or a weight belt, dietary requirements, who to call in an emergency. Logistics. Nobody needs to sign their shoe size.
Answers are stored against the version of the form that asked them, so rewording a question next season does not retroactively change what an answer meant.
A waiver is a document somebody agrees to
A liability release. A medical statement. An assumption-of-risk form. The signature is the entire point — without it the document does nothing, and a checkbox saying "I agree" is not the same artifact as a signed release with your agency's wording on it.
Which one do I want?
Ask one question: if this ended up in front of a lawyer, would the signature matter?
- Yes — waiver.
- No — intake form.
If you are unsure, waiver. A signed document you did not strictly need is a minor annoyance; an unsigned one you did need is the reason this distinction exists.
Can I do both in one go?
Yes. A waiver can be filled from an intake form: the student answers the questions as a normal mobile form, and Side Quest Booking prints those answers onto the waiver PDF before showing it to them to sign. One link, one sitting, one document at the end.
This is how the medical statement is meant to be set up. The questions get asked in a format that works on a phone; the agency's actual document is what comes out.
Why not just type my waiver text into Side Quest Booking?
Because for most dive schools the waiver is not yours to retype. Agencies publish their release and their medical statement as specific documents. A rewritten version in somebody's rich-text editor is a different document, however carefully it was copied — and "we retyped it" is not a sentence you want to say afterwards.
So Side Quest Booking prints onto the PDF you already use. If you have no document of your own, that is a conversation to have with a lawyer rather than with a booking system. We do not supply waiver text and would be wary of any booking platform that does.
What happens to minors
A participant under 18 cannot sign for themselves. Side Quest Booking asks who is signing, and a parent or guardian signs instead — with their own name and their relationship recorded separately from the participant's. This is enforced, not merely requested: a self-signature from a known minor is refused outright.