Last night I was indirectly invited to a World Ventures seminar. It's a multi-level marketing (MLM) company that offers two ways to make money. Once you sign up as a "Travel consultant", you have a website like YTB, Expedia or any other travel booking site. If people book their travel through your site, you will make a commission. The second method of making money is to get people to sign up as "Travel consultants" under you thereby creating a pyramid, network or downline for yourself. The other product they offer is a paid membership to DreamTrips, a service that is supposed to get you discounted travel at amazingly low rates. There are guys in the company making $2.4 million a year, supposedly.
Sounds too good to be true? After doing some research on the company on Google and Yahoo, I found forums of people discussing World Ventures. All of the sponsored search results refer to this company as a scam. Digging deeper, I found that the founders of this company were all top performers in Pre-Paid Legal and YTB (Your Travel Business) MLM companies. YTB was in the news recently for being a scam and owing their reps a lot of money. Pre-Paid Legal had a lot of buzz around 2003 and since has died down a lot.
I have always been skeptical of pyramid schemes and the only product I'm interested in is the discounted travel, but even that seems possible without the paid membership.
Jeff Johnston, a former professional golfer was the speaker at the presentation last night. A 26 year-old Carlos Rogers was also mentioned. These guys are travelling and putting on these seminars with their top producers to keep it going.
Summary: The founders of World Ventures LLC are Wayne Nugent, Dan Stammen and Mike Azcue, all of whom were top producers for Pre-Paid Legal, YTB and other MLM companies. They learn the business, the ins and outs and form a network and decide why will they work for the guy up there when they can break off and form their own MLM company. Then, this company really has no product and tries to sell people the dream that they can travel to "hot spots" around the world for pennies on the dollar. The reason they're able to negotiate these deals with cruise lines is because they are getting group discounts during the lowest possible seasons for travel to these destinations. It has been proven that you will NOT make money from your own travel site. How will your non-appealing, identical to all the other idiots site compete with Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. The only way to make money is to sign people up to become "travel consultants". These MLM companies thrive on finding a few really good salesmen that really portray their belief in a product. Every wanna-be that signs up thinks they can be like these super salesmen and pays thousands to attend leadership conferences and "Accelerated Training" seminars in hopes that they can grow their pyramid networks.
Some of the most successful companies are really selling hope, disguised as a product or service.
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