Remote YearReviews of remoteyear.com

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi Josh, Thank you so much for sharing your review. As the new CEO of Remote Year, I truly appreciate you taking the time to share your your feedback and perspective with us. COVID-19 truly was a tough time for our business and we made it through due to the trust, support, and leadership from you from your time on both the Aurora and Imani programs. It's incredible to see you still continuing to play a huge role in our community even after your programs. We are truly grateful to be back in 2021, stronger than ever, and ready to deliver the programs and experiences for you and our community. Thank you so much for your support and we look forward to crossing paths with you again in the world! Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi Amanda, Thank you so much for the beautiful reflection on your Remote Year experience. As the new CEO of Remote Year, I truly appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us. COVID-19 truly was a tough time for our business and we made it through due to the trust and support from you and thousands of people in our “Remote Nation” community. We are truly grateful to be back in 2021, stronger than ever, and ready to deliver the programs and experiences for you and our community. Thank you so much for your support and we hope to keep building lifelong memories and connections for you and our community! Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi Red, Thank you so much for your feedback. We pride ourselves on being the most trusted platform for remote working and remote learning globally and have had thousands of customers trust us with their life-changing experiences around the world. We are sorry that your experience has been unpleasant and inconsistent with the experience we work hard to deliver for our customers. As the new CEO of Remote Year, I would love to hear more from you and ask that you reach out to us at [email protected] so that we can address whatever feedback you have specifically about your experience. Also, we want to emphasize that we did not solicit articles or reviews that misrepresent any information. We have been very public about and posted an announcement in March 2020 that our programs were suspended. We will only resume programs starting in March 2021. We sincerely appreciate your understanding. We are grateful for the opportunity to earn back your trust and deliver the life-changing experience you deserve. Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi Lauren, Thank you so much for your feedback and I'm truly sorry about your experience so far. COVID-19 was an unexpected global situation that impacted the entire world and led us to suspend all operations until it was safe to resume programs. Like many travel companies of our size, we held hope that we could return to running programs much sooner. However, COVID-19 forced us to suspend all of our programs throughout the world, including the United States until we could resume again safely. As we communicated to you and all of our participants for Remote Village at the time, we offered refunds in the same method that you used for payment. Because you had used a down payment & credit on balance to reserve your spot, we returned 100% of the program cost back to your down payment & credit on balance. A few weeks ago, we began to resume operations and have made many changes to continue to protect 100% of your payments and credits on balance. 1) We have waived all change fees and expiration dates for any payments or credits. This means that you can use your balance at any time over your lifetime. 2) We have released itineraries to our existing customers so that you have priority access to any programs before they are offered to the public. 3) We have created a dedicated team to work with each of our customers individually to make sure you have all options available to you when you are ready to travel again. 4) We have offered more flexible options to use your credit, such as shorter, flexible programs (1 week - 1 month long). 5) We have offered the ability to use 100% of your balance with our partner, Selina, at hundreds of their locations around the world. We sincerely appreciate your understanding. We are grateful for the opportunity to earn back your trust and deliver the life-changing experience you deserve. Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi C, Thanks so much for sharing your review with us! As the new CEO of Remote Year, I truly appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us and for continuing to support us. COVID-19 truly was a tough time for our business and we made it through due to the trust and support from you and thousands of people in our “Remote Nation” community. We hope to share more good times with you in the future! Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Feb 15, 2021

Hi Julia, Thank you so much for your feedback and I’m truly sorry to hear about your experience. We would have loved to be able to offer cash refunds to customers during the pandemic and would probably have asked for the same thing if we were in your shoes. However, like many travel businesses of our size, we were heavily impacted by COVID-19 and had to preserve our ability to fully honor our commitments to all customers. As the new CEO of Remote Year, I am committed to delivering programs and experiences for you and any customers with balances on record throughout 2021 or when you are ready to travel again. A few weeks ago, we began to resume operations and have made many changes to continue to protect 100% of your payments and credits on balance. 1) We have waived all change fees and expiration dates for any payments or credits. This means that you can use your balance at any time over your lifetime. 2) We have released itineraries to our existing customers so that you have priority access to any programs before they are offered to the public. 3) We have created a dedicated team to work with each of our customers individually to make sure you have all options available to you when you are ready to travel again. 4) We have offered more flexible options to use your credit, such as shorter, flexible programs (1 week - 1 month long). 5) We have offered the ability to use 100% of your balance with our partner, Selina, at hundreds of their locations worldwide. We sincerely appreciate your understanding. We are grateful for the opportunity to earn back your trust and deliver the life-changing experience you deserve as we have for thousands of other customers over the past 5 years. Shaun Prime CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Jun 19, 2020

Hi Jules, Thanks for your feedback and I’m sorry to hear about your experience. Over the past few months we have been working tirelessly to ensure that our current customers and staff have a comfortable path in this time of crisis, and also to make sure that we build a path to service all of our paid customers as soon as possible. We have been doing our best to communicate regularly through multiple emails and hosted a founders webinar in April to answer open questions. Over the last few weeks, we have been working around the clock to launch Remote Village, our first ever US program. Any down payments paid for global programs can be used to cover the down payment of Remote Village, and also toward global programs as soon as we are able to relaunch across the world. We appreciate your patience in these trying times when we’re all unclear how things are shifting in the world and we hope that you will travel with us when this time passes. If you have any questions, you can contact [email protected] and our team will help. Sam Pessin Co-Founder & CEO, Remote Year

Response from Remote Year· Jun 19, 2020

Hi Sam - Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate your thoughts on the different features of Remote Year. Overall, our programs have gotten really strong feedback over the last 3 years (50-60 range of Net Promoter Score). We have always used constructive feedback to continue to improve the platform. Tracks were actually born from customer feedback directly, and those local experiences got an average of 4.3 out of 5 points in feedback scores in 2019. We will continue to work to improve those scores, but we are proud of the progress so far. In terms of our reaction to COVID-19, I'm sorry that we disappointed you. Throughout the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were constantly in touch with our health and safety advisors, International SOS. We followed their guidance throughout, including our decision to pause programs on March 20th. At that point, we did the following: - Told all customers that they could stay in their current apartments until the end of the month, and that we would connect them directly to the landlords if they wanted to stay longer - Offered to help anyone find flights to get home through our travel team - Offered support finding new places to stay for those that wanted to shelter in place - Kept one member of our city team on board through April in cities where we had a higher number of customers that sheltered in place As you mentioned, we also kept some customer service staff on board to help us communicate with customers as effectively as possible. In the last two months, we've been working to launch our first ever US programs - Remote Village. In addition, we will be launching global programs as soon as possible. All of these efforts were in the spirit of offering as many options to you and our other customers as possible to use any outstanding payments to Remote Year. I hope you will travel with us again so we can rebuild your trust and serve you the way we've served 3,000+ other customers across 60 programs since 2015. Sam Pessin Co-Founder & CEO, Remote Year