Influencers promote InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing to large audiences, with slogans such as ‘normalise working from anywhere’. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Influencers promote InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing to large audiences, with slogans such as ‘normalise working from anywhere’. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images Consumer affairs ‘I was making no money’: Travel agent side hustle promoted by influencers criticised over fees Would-be marketers enticed by online talk of entering a world of travel and easy cash find that the reality is rather different
Sarah Marsh Sat 3 Oct 2026 13.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google M onths 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”.
View image in fullscreen Yasmin Hadlow in series 13 of Love Island. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock 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. “I was making no money on the travel side,” he says, adding that the PlanNet rep who recruited him told him “to try recruitment instead, by signing up with PlanNet Marketing”.
View image in fullscreen PlanNet Marketing recruits people to work as independent travel agents with a separate US business, InteleTravel. Photograph: Hotel Photography Srl 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.
“I ended up with a team of 10 people, but it never felt like me,” Mark says. “The whole point of joining was to be a travel agent, not a recruiter.”
PlanNet Marketing’s annual income disclosure statement suggests earnings from recruitment are typically very lo…