The other side of Internet Travel

YTB NETWORK MARKETING (MLM) - CAN REGULAR FOLKS MAKE MONEY?

I still have a travel plan in the works but for now, an article on YTB. One statistic that stood out was that YTB has gotten "130,000 people to pay money to YTB for the ability to sell airline tickets and cruises."

Most of those people don't make any money. They pay $450 = $50/month. This allows a few people to make fortunes but for most people there is no money:

YTB's 45,000 entry-level sales reps — the people who sell new travel agencies — on average earned $90.32 last year. And of the more than 200,000 people who paid the company as much as $1,000 to run a travel website in 2007, nearly 125,000 didn't earn a penny in commissions, according to Brown's lawsuit. Half of the rest earned less than $39. And while YTB took in $103 million last year from selling and maintaining websites, it paid out just $13.4 million in commissions for selling travel.

Clearly the company is making money - 100 million in income and 13 million in commission? Someone is getting screwed.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown says YTB is a scam. The fact that so few people make money means it must be a pyramid scheme. I don't think it proves this at all. It proves that some people don't understand network marketing. The whole point is that it allows you to start a business with a minimum investment. $450 + $50/month is more than other network marketing companies (at least the few I've heard of).

It also shows that joining YTB doesn't make someone a travel agent so it's still very difficult for YTB people to sell travel. Most of them don't make money because they don't sell travel and they don't recruit more 'agents'.

I'm not here to tell you what to do, but I will offer some advice. Unless you're confident that you can sell travel and recruit more people into YTB then it is not the business for you. You would need to be convinced that the YTB website is the best place to buy or sell travel. And that makes no sense because there are thousands of identical YTB 'travel agency' websites online... I have thousands of people who want to travel reading this blog, but I am not joining YTB. I don't want to try to sell you all travel.

It's been a while, but some of you will remember that we've talked about YTB and other 'card mills' before. Here, if you read the comments some YTB tool repeated calls me a liar - you still in business Earl? Here I mention another problem with GTI and YTB - since anyone can join you'll end up being in business with some real losers. In the comments Earl claimed that bad travel agents wouldn't last a day in YTB. I think he's full of crap. Here's the October, 2007 post when I first became aware of the issue.

A related post is that untrained travel agents are less likely to provide the kind of consulting many of us expect.