@leo

I want to start by saying that Florianopolis is an amazing destination to go to and I strongly recommend anyone to visit the island. I mainly chose Florianopolis for its nature and beautiful beaches. For a first experience with a community program, I was very disappointed by what Remote Year offered:

Housing: the establishment is located in Centro (downtown) of Florianopolis and is a very recent building with great amenities (except for the gym which is extremely basic) including the co-working spaces (there are two) and the restaurants. However due to its location, if you are expecting to finish work at 5PM and be able to go the beach right after to enjoy the sun, you will need a minimum of 25-30 minutes (by car/Uber) before getting to one of the closest beach. It would sometime even take up to 50 minutes to get to a beach after work due to traffic on the island. Sunset was around 7PM in Florianopolis when I visited in January, so you could understand that I barely had any time to enjoy the beaches during the week (at lunch time) or after work. This was a great disappointment to me as I had chosen Florianopolis for its beaches and nature : I could only really enjoy them on weekends unfortunately. Conclusion: great establishment but not the best location if you were thinking of going to beaches during the week.

Built-in community :

1) One of the purposes of my trip with Remote Year was to be able to meet with people from all over the world, or at least from different countries to learn from different cultures. This is not the case at all : my group was consisted of 90% from the United-States, 5% from Canada (including myself) and the remaining 5% from different countries. I have nothing against Americans and I did meet great people in my group, however if you are expecting to meet people from different countries this will not be the case.

2) The majority of the activities amongst the group are not included in the price you pay : be ready to budget yourself a great amount of money in order to participate in the excursions with the group. The day excursions are all over $150 USD, which after talking to a few locals are way OVERpriced. For the activities below $100 USD, do not expect too much from them. I had paid $72 USD for ''snacks'' on the beach, a very short guided tour of Santo Antonio de Lisboa where you will visit a church, and go to a Samba bar at the end of the night. All things you could do for free on your own! I did ask from a reimbursement for this activity, which was a really hard process as they were trying to find excuses not to do so. They were blaming me for the following (which I quote from one of their responses by email) : ''you were late to the experience as you opted to not ride with the group and missed a good portion of it which would make it really hard to get the most of the experience''. Which was totally not the case ... After a few exchanges of emails, they did end up reimbursing me.

The base cost of the trip does not really include access to the community and activities within the group, but rather an opportunity for Remote Year to $ell you extra activities once you get there. Most of the activities I enjoyed with the group were outside of Remote Year's scope.

I still enjoyed my trip to Florianopolis as this is an amazing destination that you should definitely visit ! Brazilians are very welcoming people :) I wish I had read more of the negative reviews before booking this with Remote Year.