‘I was making no money’: Travel agent side hustle promoted by influencers criticised over fees
Influencers are promoting InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing as lucrative side hustles, but recruited agents report significant financial difficulties. The business model relies on sign-up fees and monthly costs that often exceed the low commissions earned from travel bookings. Critics argue the structure encourages recruitment over actual sales, resulting in minimal income for most participants.
- ▪Agents pay a sign-up fee of approximately £150 and monthly fees of £30 to £40 for access to the booking system and training.
- ▪InteleTravel agents earn about 70% of the roughly 10% commission paid by suppliers on holiday bookings.
- ▪PlanNet Marketing recruits agents to build a downline, offering approximately $4 per new recruit plus referral bonuses.
- ▪The average annual earnings for PlanNet Marketing representatives are reported to be around $40.
- ▪Influencers such as Yasmin Hadlow and Vicky Pattison promote the opportunity with slogans emphasizing freedom and income.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/oct/03/online-marketing-the-travel-agent-side-hustle-that-took-us-nowhere |
| Publication time | Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:00:57 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-03T11:13:12.586Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-03T11:13:12.586Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7mOViv0S0ihq · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Influencers promote InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing to large audiences, with slogans such as ‘normalise working from anywhere’. Photograph: Westend61/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenInfluencers promote InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing to large audiences, with slogans such as ‘normalise working from anywhere’. Photograph: Westend61/Getty ImagesConsumer affairs‘I was making no money’: Travel agent side hustle promoted by influencers criticised over feesWould-be marketers enticed by online talk of entering a world of travel and easy cash find that the reality is rather differentSarah MarshSat 3 Oct 2026 07.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleMonths before she entered the Love Island villa, the content creator Yasmin Hadlow promised viewers of her online videos that they could…
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