The $1,470.25 Take-Home Pay

A travel agent's idyllic holiday posts on Instagram hid a darker reality. Charlie Harris, 35,from Derby, was making a living selling people their dream holidays for travel agency InteleTravel. However, her main form of income wasn't from selling holidays but from recruiting other agents to sell holidays with InteleTravel through a second operation called PlanNet Marketing.

This is a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, in which sales reps earn by recruiting others into the business. Even the Instagram picture itself had more to it than first appeared. The woman in it was not one of Charlie's clients at all, but was in fact her mother - a frequent traveller whose photos she used to promote her business.

In 15 months, Charlie made just £1,470.25 from InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing: £218.49 in commission for ten travel bookings, and £1,251.76 for recruitment. After discountng the £156 joining fee she'd paid both companies to sign up, a mandatory £46 monthly fee to InteleTravel , and hundreds more spent on training events and her own website, her profit was £383.85 - a paltry average of £25.59 per month.

The 60-Hour Workweek

Working 60-hour weeks, she would search for flights and hotels for clients. 'I could spend all day putting together a quote,' she says. Effectively toiling for nothing - or a single penny an hour - the ramifications on her mental health were profound and she even ended up self-harming.

Five years on, Charlie has completed an Open University degree in psychology and counselling, which has helped her to understand how the scheme worked. 'The manipulation started to make sense,' she says. 'At first I thought I was a perpetrator. But I'd been brainwashed.'

The Unnamed Buyer

Donald Bradley, the founder of PlanNet Marketing, has said his 'passion' for the business stems from his desire to lift people out of poverty.. His net worth isn't known, but given he declared in 2023 that his ambition was to increase the number of sales reps paying his company $40 (£29.88) a month from 82,000 worldwide to one million by 2028, it's safe to say he's a multi-millionaire.

Critics of MLMs such as his point out that the vast majority of sales reps are women needing flexible work. They are often required to make a payment to enter the company and risk straining relationships with family and friends who are bombarded with their sales pitches on social media.

The 38,000 Agents

InteleTravel has around 38,000 agents in the UK and Ireland, and it's likely you've seen its social media pictures promoting holidays on your social media feed, which are all the more alluring as summer gets underway. Of course, there's nothing wrong with travel agents earning commission when booking holidays.

But the way InteleTravel operates, with its focus on recruitment over selling holidays, has left many agents like Charlie feeling exploited and manipulated. She's not alone in her experience. Many women have come forward with similar stories of being drawn into the scheme with promises of flexible work and good pay,only to find themselves struggling to make ends meet.