To be sick of all the independent travel agents popping up on instagram?

[confusedlots]

I follow a lot of interiors/house/self build pages on Instagram, and over the past year or so, so many of them have become independent travel agents. So they may have be a nurse or a SAHM or a teacher as their main job and now suddenly they're also expert travel agents who can give you the best advice for travelling to Mexico with kids, or Dubai, when they've clearly never been to any of these places.

And the worst of it is, they're constantly trying to get others to sign up to be travel agents too, because apparently you can earn 4k a month on top of your regular job!!

I guess it's another of those pyramid schemes or whatever you call it, but it's literally all over my Instagram now and I like following these people because of the home interiors content, but I don't want to be constantly bombarded with this!

Can’t blame anyone for trying to make some extra money right now. Shame it’s done with MLMs though.

I agree it's the latest Forever Living etc and it's just conning women. We had a mum at our school years ago trying to recruit for Airbourne. Had the car and the personalised number plate. Sided up to me asking if I worked and do I enjoy my job because she had a really good opportunity for me. 🙄. It's all disappeared from her SM and the car is gone. It's like it never existed.

But here we are with a load of other mums with the latest MLM and others being asked to promote their wears.

MLM

Oh god yes. It’s taken over the school mums with 3 queen bee recruiters and they’ve fallen out with one another and are desperately pushing to recruit at every sodding drop off. I’ve said no.

I book a lot of travel and spend hours researching so I would actually be decent at it in the areas I know- I know nothing about family friendly ski trips but Thailand and SE Asia with young kids I have a lot of experience. I’m savvy about getting a decent deal and using cashback sites or the cashback extras on my credit card but I feel no need to pay someone £50 a month plus to sign up to an MLM scheme.

Travel Counsellors are Professional Travel Agents, as are Not Just Travel.

You’re thinking of Inteletravel, a US MLM scheme that has come over to the UK and is trashing our travel industry.

I’m also a professional travel agent, and reading this thread is so disheartening.
Lots of us do an amazing job booking complicated itineraries, round the world trips and multi centre trips as well as bucket and spade holidays.
We’re experts who can advise on locations, logistics, finding the right hotel with the right room for larger families or multigenerational trips and combining with tickets for trains, hiring camper vans, RV’s, excursions, tours, show tickets, cruises, the lot - and all ABTA and ATOL protected - and our professionalism is being completely undermined by a load of influencers.

I had this recently. We travel a lot and I had a request from a woman who appears to also travel. She started messaging me about my trip. All very pleasant. Then tried to recruit me into being a travel agent. A bit pushy at least twice and I had to make clear I had zero interest in being an agent. It felt like MLM when the woman at work suddenly wanted me to sell Forever Living shit with her

Our local FB mums group used to be a good place to ask for ideas on holidays. Personal recommendations and new places. Now anyone asking anything like that is bombarded with these travel agents offering to ‘sort something amazing out for you’.

I’ve had this following a lecture I went to recently. Got chatting to the woman next to me and we got on well so as we both headed to the station, grabbed a drink before train departure time. Got on like a house on fire, really had a great conversation then she messaged me later saying she knew how much I loved to travel, was I interested in becoming a travel agent like her. It really pissed me off as it felt like it invalidated our chat and time together. It makes me wonder how much of the conversation she was actually interested in and how much she was just waiting for the opportunity to pounce. She never mentioned the monthly fee, strangely….

Exactly the same friends that peddled that bloody Arbonne are now ‘travel consultants’.

It’s just another MLM scam except this one gifts them cheap looking rings rather than a leased car 😂