Paradise Interns

I wasn't sure whether or not to leave a review but I think it's important for anyone in the future considering this program to hear both sides of the experience.

I'll start this review by echoing what others have said: it's an incredible opportunity and I made lifelong friends. I started the Paradise Internship in January 2020 as a non-diving intern. The first month was great - bootcamp was intense but I learned a lot. I made some amazing friends and the PI staff who taught us the course were absolutely brilliant - down to earth, incredibly friendly and helpful and went out of their way to support us. I have nothing bad to say about them whatsoever. Due to some very sad personal circumstances, we didn't get to meet one of the staff members and unfortunately didn't really hear from her throughout bootcamp.

The course was missing a fair few elements that we'd been promised to learn about (video editing being a major one, as it was a weekly requirement for our entire internship with a threat of losing our deposit money if we didn't stick to this), to the extent that our entire cohort of interns decided to speak to the PI staff and voice our concerns. While some elements were then included at the end of bootcamp, video editing wasn't.

I was over the moon with my placement and felt it matched my personality perfectly. I settled in immediately and made lots of friends. The weekly support from Elisha was brilliant and I loved being able to learn more about blogging/writing from Rika. I was really happy with how everything was going.

The issues began when the Coronavirus hit. Everything seemed to turn upside down in a matter of days. We all received a message from a staff member telling us that we had a group meeting the next day and, if we didn't attend, we'd lose our $1000 deposit just like that. In the meeting she gave us three options - to stay and continue (but not recommended), to leave and continue the internship from home, or to quit the program.

She warned that most of our companies would probably go bust and there was a chance PI would do the same. She said - fairly casually, I felt - that she’d love to give us our deposits back there and then but, due to our contracts having a force majeure clause, she wasn’t able to. I pointed out that most of us had never received contracts (that we were supposed to get mid February before we moved to our placements) and she said - equally casually - that we had even less working in our favour then. Many of us recorded this conversation as we were unsure on the legality of this result.

After much consideration and speaking to my family and manager, I decided to stay. This was the decision of most interns. The idea of going home, when many of our home countries were in (and continue to be in) much worse situations with the pandemic than Indonesia, seemed to be nonsensical. As did the thought of booking last minute flights home while also being warned that we likely wouldn’t see our $1000 deposit again.

Here, I want to stress something a staff member mentioned in her reply to previous interns - saying that "They will be receiving their full deposit upon completion of the internship.” A staff member warned us on the group call that there was a fair to medium chance that we wouldn’t receive this money back even if we did continue, as it had already been spent ($1000 x almost 30 interns from the November and January cohort). A staff member said she would do her best to make sure those who continued the internship from home got their deposit back eventually but she couldn’t promise due to the fact that it had already been spent. Some interns decided to pause their internships from home after hearing this. This was also a factor in my (and other interns' ) decision to stay in Indonesia.

The next day, we received a directive from a staff member saying she'd limited our options to leaving Indonesia and continuing our internships from home, or staying and losing our deposit and any support from PI. After speaking again to my family and manager, I decided to stay at my placement. I notified the PI team and, before I’d even got a reply, I had my access revoked from not only the programs that we had used with PI, but also business manager on Facebook for my placement's account. Shortly after, there was also an attempt to change the Instagram password. My scheduling account was deleted, along with the work I’d created for my manager for the following week. I had to message the PI team and ask them to please un-delete my account to access the pre-approved work.

I decided to stay in Indonesia alongside three of the other interns and am very happy with my decision to do so. Fortunately, my manager here has been incredibly supportive not only to me but also to the other Paradise Interns who have stayed on the island.

Overall, I’m very glad I took this opportunity with Paradise Interns and it’s given me the chance to live in Indonesia and now pursue other freelance opportunities. It's effectively forced me to take the leap into freelancing that I was hoping to take in July when the program finished!

However, I’d advise against the program due to the financial uncertainty of its future and the, in my opinion, careless and casual attitude shown by a staff member when it came to supporting almost 30 young people who’d quit their jobs and uprooted their lives to move to the other side of the world.

I’m writing this review about my experience as a Paradise Intern, for people in the future who may be considering this, or any other similar venture that Anna Kloth may start when life is back to normal. I have tried to be fair and balanced in what I say, as there were some positive factors about my experience in Indonesia, but I feel that it is really important that people out there are aware of the basic and important failings in this programme which are very concerning. I would also say that I am not alone in having these concerns and many of my fellow interns have had similar or worse experiences.

I want to start by saying that I had an amazing and unforgettable time in Indonesia, thanks to my awesome dive shop, the great people I met, and the memories that I will always have. I have nothing but positive praise for my dive shop and the time I spent working there. My dive shop suited my personality and my vibe so well, and for that, I am very grateful. Another positive of the internship was the content that we learnt during bootcamp as it was very interesting, useful, and informative. The other members of the Paradise interns team were very supportive throughout the internship. The members of staff whose roles were content, blogs, and admin were all super helpful.

I was a Paradise Intern from November 2019, and this was planned to be until May 2020. After the month boot camp in Bali I was placed with a dive shop in Labuan Bajo where I arrived in December 2019. It soon became apparent that there were major flaws with Anna’s management style; primarily around inconsistent and poorly communicated information and expectations. We were often told one thing at our monthly meetings with Anna, and then a few days later told something very different, as though the Paradise team had forgotten to tell us what was expected of us and then tried to put the responsibility on us for these mistakes. The whole question of the ‘fines’ or deductions from the $1000 deposit was unclear, poorly communicated and inconsistent. This $1000 dollar deposit was meant to be returned on our successful completion of the internship.

When the coronavirus pandemic started to become serious, we were told by Anna on our group video call that they would advise us to go home. There was clearly no contingency planning, no policies and procedures and no forethought about a very serious and difficult situation for 18 young people in remote locations far from home and support networks.

She told us that we had two options; to stay in Indonesia and have no affiliation to Paradise interns as they could not support us, or go home and continue the social media remotely from home. There was no support or help around the options available, the way this was communicated was in a pressured, panicked and completely unprofessional and unethical manner.

We all had 1 week to decide and let Paradise Interns know our decision. I decided initially to stay in Indonesia as I wanted to continue working with my dive shop. Upon telling Anna my decision, I was removed from all the networking apps, the paradise interns networks and my message was ignored by Anna, with no response. We were all young people alone in a foreign country, and given the situation, everyone was worried and unsure about what was going on. Anna left us with no support and no guidance in Indonesia. Her responses to the concerns I expressed were rude, dismissive and added stress to an already difficult situation.

We all asked if our deposits would be returned to us, and were told that no our deposits could not be returned to us because the money was gone. We were told that Anna had spent all of our deposits (18 interns = $18,000 USD) and that they would be using the deposits from the next round of interns to give us ours back. We were told that our deposits had been used to pay for the accommodation for bootcamp in Bali. However, there was clearly not going to be another round of interns due to the pandemic, so our money was gone.

The principle of a deposit, for anything, is that it is held in safe keeping for its possible return, NOT spent by the company on keeping their liquidity due to poor financial management. Each of us has now lost $1000, which, especially given that we had to find our way home , after booked flights being cancelled, was catastrophic. Without family support I would have been in a desperate situation, and the lack of support, help or advice from Anna Kloth was appalling and deeply unethical.

For the reasons stated above, I would not recommend anybody to put their trust in Anna Kloth or her business ventures.

I was a Diving intern on the November 2019 intake and was placed at Manta Dive in Gili Trawangan.

Firstly I want to talk about the opportunity that Paradise Interns offered. It was a massive leap of faith to fly to Indonesia completely alone and to join a bunch of strangers and people often said I was crazy for doing it. But having spoken with the programme co-ordinator Anna I was confident that this wasn't a con and that it was going to be the experience of a lifetime. And immediately I want to say that yes it really was. From the point when I started, I absolutely fell in love with the place and the people. I have definitely made friends on the course which I know I will still speak to for years to come. Paradise Interns gave me that opportunity to meet like-minded people who shared my passion for scuba diving and marketing and for that I will forever be grateful.

The bootcamp was also brilliant. Pronoia community was a bit run down but is due to be renovated. It didn't really bother me too much because the complex was massive and safe. We were a group of 20 interns and the complex had volleyball courts, a restaurant, lecture hall, 100m walk to the beach, 2 swimming pools and a football pitch! It was amazing.

The programme itself was in-depth and complex. There's definitely no denying that this is a serious course and one that you need to be switched on to learn and build a strong depth in social media marketing and how it all operates. I always felt exhausted at the end of the lessons as we crammed in as much as possible but I enjoy that way of learning.

When I got to my placement in Gili Trawangan the dive shop was incredible. I found it tricky to fit in at first as the shop was a well-established community but after a few weeks, I had found my place and fell in love with the island and all the people in it. Manta Dive is an amazing place to do this internship as you are surrounded by creative people who come together to make as much entertaining content as possible. That's the reason I wanted to do this internship and I was placed in the dive shop that suited my abilities best. That was a great judgement call by Anna when she decided where to place me.

Overall there is a lot of positives I will take away from my time on the internship, however, there were some fundamental flaws that have left an extremely sour taste in my mouth and would result in me not recommending the programme to anybody in the future.

The biggest issue that myself and other interns struggled with was the deposit scheme. All interns pay a $1000USD deposit at the start of the internship. If work is not completed the finances are withdrawn from that deposit. There is differing amounts for differing discrepancies. There is also a warning system in place with multiple warnings before you start losing money. It added a lot of pressure to our already extensive workload though and the discrepancies included extremely small details such as not tagging other accounts.

The initial 2 months of the internship were fine, then one day I was fined over $440 for missing stories and not tagging accounts. As were many other interns. A completely flawed penalty system was in place where they used up every single warning in one go and then immediately started fining us. This came one week after Anna explained in our personal check-in that I was overachieving. The analytics were showing growth for the Dive shop. My shop was extremely happy with the content I was producing and the results it was getting. What is the point of having a warning system if it doesn't actually alert you that you are at risk of being penalised?

There was also an issue with communication about my visa. Prior to my arrival at the internship, I emailed several times about my passport and visa. I was told it would be fine and (the lawyers) were looking into it. It turned out to not be true. The visa was an issue which reoccurred throughout my time. The most notable time was the evening before I had a 7am flight to Singapore for a visa run, they informed me that because of the issue with my passport I had messaged them several times about I was having to change my flights to Kuala Lumpur. The cost was covered by Paradise Interns but the stress of that situation meant that me being able to remain in Indonesia was in the balance. I felt this issue could have been resolved well in advance when I was trying to communicate my issue with them.

Another issue was how they handled the Covid-19 outbreak. I had to leave the course 2 months before my internship ended. We learnt after a meeting that Paradise Interns had infact already spent all of our deposits on securing the Bootcamp location for 2 more years. Parade Interns were then going to be paying our deposit money back from future income they earnt. They had spent everybody's deposits. So not only were we getting fined left right and centre but it turns out the money had already been spent.

There was no guarantee that any of us would see a penny of our deposit back again, even if the individual hadn't received any fines and done the entire required workload. Not only is it unethical to spend our deposits but the fact that entering these unprecedented times was going to leave many of us in financial ruin. It is of popular opinion now that the way things are being run with remaining interns is to force as many to exit the programme as possible.

The internship is completely against any sort of feedback. Having returned to the Western world I needed to get a full-time job immediately. When I asked Anna if there was any consideration for this I was told 'it is not up for discussion'. When I gave her possible solutions which would benefit all parties she continued along the 'it is not up for discussion' route.

My final communication with Anna before deciding to exit the course is when she focused on my lack of communication with them as the only issue. There was no consideration for their wrong doings. No apology. No acknowledgement that they had also made mistakes. When it was Paradise Interns in the wrong it was 'just where we're at'.

I will always have a high level of respect for everything Anna has achieved. We always felt leaving lectures with her that she was brilliant at teaching and engaging with us. The downside of the internship is the business side of things. It is still relatively young in terms of a business so the flaws that I faced should hopefully be ironed out in the future but the lack of consideration for feedback makes me think that it will just be more of the same.

If you are doing this course to be scuba diving, I recommend just doing your divemaster as it will be more cost-effective.

I was thinking about combining scuba diving with some marketing-related long before even before hearing about Paradise Interns. After stumbling across their website for the first time, I labelled the whole thing as a scam - it just sounded too good to be true. Well, after a few restless nights and a never-ending search through my browser history, I took the plunge and applied.

From this point onwards, the whole application process was pretty straightforward. My last doubts were quickly erased when I got to speak with Anna, the founder of the program personally during the one-hour skype interview. A few weeks later, after trying to explain the whole shebang to family members and friends (with limited success), I hopped on a plane to Bali. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life!

I had some experience in different fields of multimedia, but I was pretty much new to social media marketing at the start of the internship. However, looking back at the first month of the internship, Anna, Pim and Elisha taught me more than I could have ever imagined. In fact, it made me wonder what schools are doing wrong as I've never experienced such a steep learning curve before. It was intense (they call it "the Bootcamp" for a reason), but I loved it. Also, hanging out in Bali with all the other interns was hella fun!

After the first month, we all got placed at different dive shops or companies. My placement was kinda special as it was split up into two different dive centres within the same company. I got to spend the first half of my internship in Malaysia and the rest of it in Komodo!

The first few weeks at the placement can be daunting, and I found myself chased by deadlines while trying to settle at the new location. Not being a native English speaker didn't make things easier too. However, I quickly got the hang of the marketing part of the internship and was diving almost daily! The more you get used to to the tools and practises used for the company's social media presence, the easier it gets and I had loads of time available to just soak up life in the tropics, dive and hang out with amazing people!

I came into the internship full of energy, keen to learn more about social media marketing but mainly to get into diving and to live abroad in the tropics. After six months, I can happily tick all the boxes, so I'd call that a win!

Truly unique and extraordinary 6 months full of learning, friendship, challenges and stunning Indonesia's nature. Paradise Interns is a small group of passionate marketers and divers who love to share their knowledge and experiences. I had an absolutely fabulous time taking the internship with them. It wasn't always easy but totally rewarding. I have improved greatly in social media management and also became a very skilled divemaster which helped to open the door to this industry in which I wish to continue my journey! I highly recommend this company to everyone seeking a new challenge and wanting to. Improve his digital nomad skills!