This Startup Stranded Customers Overseas With No Refunds

Megan Mann’s month in the beautiful Brazilian city of Florianópolis got off to a lousy start. The 32-year-old online marketer flew there from Buenos Aires at the end of April with about a dozen other people. All were customers or employees of We Roam, a startup that was basically a travel agency crossed with WeWork. (No relation, though the confusion seems inevitable.) We Roam, which pitched “digital nomads” on traveling the world while working remotely, had organized a series of 12 monthlong stays in different countries, promising to book the apartments, offices, and airfare in exchange for $2,000 a month and an upfront deposit of a few thousand dollars per person. Some of Mann’s travel companions had joined the trip midway or planned to bail early, but when she went to bed for the first time in her Florianópolis apartment, stop No. 5, she was in for the whole year, she says. Then she woke up to an email labeled “Urgent Message From The CEO,” in which We Roam head Nathan Yates got right to the point.

“Dear Members,” wrote Yates, who declined to comment for this story, “there are no words for this. I am devastated to announce that our dream, our family, our company can no longer continue.” Following a couple of lawsuits, We Roam had run out of money and would “begin unwinding things immediately.” For Mann and her fellow travelers, that meant they had the next few weeks to stay in their Florianópolis housing, as well as prearranged plane tickets to their next destination, Medellín, Colombia. But Yates was shutting down the company without securing their accommodations in Medellin, settling anything about the other planned legs of their journey, or figuring out how they’d ultimately get back to the U.S. “We felt abandoned,” Mann says. “We were left in a country and told, You have a flight to get somewhere else, but it’s not a flight home, it’s to your next destination, where there is nothing waiting for you.”