Months before she entered the Love Island villa, the content creator Yasmin Hadlow promised viewers of her online videos that they could “catch flights and get paid mid-air”. All they had to do, she said, was send her a direct message with the word “freedom”. The 23-year-old is among several influencers and celebrities, including the former Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison, working for PlanNet Marketing, which recruits people to work as independent travel agents with a separate US business, InteleTravel.
Pattison’s Instagram page, Vickys Vacays, says it helps women “build confidence, income and freedom through a supportive online travel business”. It sounds like a great way to make money. But the Guardian has spoken to seven people who were recruited as InteleTravel agents by PlanNet Marketing reps, not the influencers mentioned above, who said they struggled to make money once sign-up costs and monthly fees were taken into account.
Some of them said the people who recruited them encouraged them to sign up as PlanNet Marketing reps and recruit others, and that became their main focus rather than selling holidays. Mark* always wanted to be a travel agent. He was recruited by a PlanNet rep to work with InteleTravel in 2021 when he was 28.
He had just been furloughed during Covid, wanted a career change and was looking at different routes to his dream job. He paid InteleTravel a sign-up fee of about £150, plus £30 to £40 a month for access to its booking system and training. Agents earn about 70% of the roughly 10% commission suppliers pay on bookings.
So, if they sell £10,000 worth of holidays, the supplier pays out £1,000 in commission and the agent gets £700. After about 18 months working long days, Mark had only made a handful of sales. If you are an InteleTravel agent, joining PlanNet Marketing is optional.
Those who do so pay PlanNet Marketing a separate monthly fee of about £14. They then get roughly $4, or about £3, for every new person they recruit as an active travel agent, plus referral bonuses and rank-based payouts as their “downline” (number of recruits) grows. Its most recent figures show average annual earnings across its general base of representatives are about $40.
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