World Ventures Compensation Plan

Today we are going to continue our series on taking a look at the compensation plan of different network marketing companies. Up this week we are going to look at the World Ventures compensation plan.

If you would like more information how how network marketing compensation plans work in general, take a look at this post entitled how to evaluate a network marketing compensation plan.

World Ventures is a travel network marketing company. They market travel packages as well as a travel membership club. They also offer a business opportunity where you can make money by offering these packages and the opportunity to others as well.

The company was founded in December of 2005, so it is over 3 years old. That puts it in start-up phase. If you read my recent blog post about LocalAdLink and the problem with MLM Startups, you know that I don't recommend that you join ANY MLM that hasn't been around for at least 5 years. Feel free to read that post if you haven't already done so.

Let's take a look at the World Ventures Pay Plan and see how it matches up.

The first way you get paid is through direct sales. Whenever you personally make a sale to a customer, you get paid. For example, if I were to go to your World Ventures website and book a flight, hotel and rental car, the company receives a commission from the airline, the hotel provider and the rental car provider.

50% of the commission that the company receives is paid back to the distributor who made the sale. You can increase the percentage up to as high as 80% if you are willing to actuallly become a travel agent.

So lets say I book a flight for $300, a hotel for $500 and a rental car for $200. That's a total of $1000. World Ventures will receive a commission on that package. Let's say it's 8%. The company will receive $80 for the $1000 package. You will receive half of that, which is $40.

What is that percentage? You never really know. The percentage is based on a wide variety of factors including the supplier that the travel is booked from, the agreements that World Ventures has with that supplier and the amount of travel that World Ventures books with that supplier on an annual basis.

Since I travel 3-4 times a year, I decided to do some price shopping to see if World Ventures offers better deals than what I get through Priceline. My family is flying to Palm Springs, California in July for a business trip/vacation and I'm flying to Vegas in September for a business trip. Priceline was slightly less expensive than what World Ventures was quoting me for the same exact flights.

Therein lies the problem with the travel industry. While it is a huge industry, it is also a very COMPETITVE industry. Each company is selling the exact same thing. You are selling the same flighs, the same hotel, the same rental car, etc. Therefore whoever offers the best prices is going to win.

Since there's other companies in the travel industry that do significantly more volume than World Ventures, they can get better prices and offer them to you at discount prices.

But you say "so what, I can sign up as a distributor for World Ventures and book my travel with myself, thus pocketing the commissions." That may be true, but I can do the exact same thing by signing up as an affiliate for one of the major travel websites. Plus signing up as an affiliate for those sites is FREE whereas, I would have to PAY a one time fee, plus a monthly fee to do it with World Ventures.

In addition, there is a good chance that my commissions as an affiliate could actually be more than what my commissions would be as a World Ventures representative. For example, I read somewhere that World Ventures doesn't pay on flight only packages. Affiliates for travel websites do get paid for flight only packages.

In addition to getting paid for travel bookings, you also get paid for selling World Ventures travel memberships. There are two memberships that World Ventures offers for sale.

The first is the Leisure Travel & Consulting Package. This is basically a website that you can book travel through. You can book your own travel through this website or you can promote the website to others and let them book travel through the website. It costs $199 one time to get this website, plus you have to pay $19.99 a month to maintain it.

So you are looking at $438.88 for the first year, plus $239.88 for each additional year to have this package. I personally see no reason why anyone would pay this kind of money when they can get something similiar for free just by signing up as an affiliate for one of the top travel websites like Priceline or Expedia.

The second is the World Venture Dreamtrips. With this program, World Ventures offers a number of trips throughout the year to various destinations. Basically you look at a calendar to see when you want to go on vacation. You see what trip they are doing at that time and you book it. The trips are for very low prices.

For example, I saw a 5 day, 4 night vacation to Cancun, Mexico for only $269 per person based on double occupancy. On the Dreamtrip website, they say that the best online price is $402.

So I decided to google that resort and see what I could find. I went to FunJet.com and found the same resort for the same time period for only $279 a person, which is a $10 per person difference. It didn't take long. It was the first website I pulled up on Google.

To become a member of World Ventures Dreamtrips, you pay $199.95 + $19.95 a month. So you are looking at a total of $439.95 for the first year, plus $239.40 for each additional year. That's a lot of money to pay to get a $10 per person discount if you ask me.

Whenever you market one of these $199 packages, you receive $50 in direct commission.

The second way you get paid is in overrides based on the sales that your team makes. World Ventures uses a combination of what is known as a binary compensation plan as well as a stairstep breakway compensation plan. However, you don't qualify for the stairstep breakway portion of the plan until you achieve at least the position of Director.

Binary plans look good when you present them. However, the way they work in practice is a different story. You can read more in my article about How To Evaluate MLM Compensation Plans, but the problem with them is that more often than not, your volume in one leg will almost always outpace the volume in the other leg, thus limiting your income.

In World Ventures, you have two legs, a left leg and a right leg. You need at least 4 active customers and/or distributors, two on each side to qualify to earn commissions. If you have 6 active customers (3 on each side), every month you maintain this, your monthly membership fees for both the Travel & Consulting Package as well as the Dreamtrips package are waived.

I actually like this feature of the compensation plan. I wish more network marketing companies waived fees after having a certain amount of customers on the books monthly.

Once you have at least 4 active customers and/or distributors, you earn $100 whenever you have at least 6 sales made in your organization. 3 sales need to be made on the left side of your organization and 3 sales need to be made on the right side of your organization in order for the $100 to be earned. This is known as a cycle.

The maximum amount that you can earn from cycle bonuses is $2000 a week. Therefore if you have more than 120 sales in a week (60 sales minimum on the left and on the right), any additional sales made, you don't earn any money on those additional sales.

Keep in mind BOTH lines of sponsorhip need to have at least 3 sales in order to get paid. If one line of sponsorhip has 100 sales and the other has 2 sales, guess how much money you make? Absolutely nothing. They do allow you to carry over volume to the next week and continue to carry it over until you reach at least 3 sales on both sides

Now one good thing is that because everybody has only 2 lines of sponsorship, that means that if you have someone in your up line that recruits a lot, there is a good chance that you are going to have distributors placed underneath you. Of course, that will only happen if you also happen to be in that leader's "weaker" organization.

However, if you earn at least $25,000 in a month, you can start all over again. What happens is you create a new position above your current position. Your current position becomes one side for your new position and you can now start building a 2nd side of customers/distributors to try and match the volume created from your original position. You can do this repeatedly each time you reach at least $25,000 a month.

That means even if you are in a strong recruiter's "weaker" organization, when that recruiter maxes out, you won't get anymore people placed under you by that leader because that leader will move on and start a new business unit and try to match the volume of his/her original business unit.

By the way, if you sign up a customer but that customer doesn't opt to do the business (i.e. purchase a RBS), that customer's membership will automatically balance to your weakest leg to help maximize your income. Customers don't go into the binary, only distributors.

In addition, whenever you earn at least 6 cycles, you also earn $100 in travel dollars. This money can be used to purchase travel from the company.

The third way you get paid in WorldVentures is in residual income. However, in order to qualify for residual income, you must be at least at the Director position. This requires at least 180 active customers (90 on the left and 90 on the right).

When this happens, you now earn $20 a month for every 6 active customers in your organization (3 on the left and 3 on the right). This maxes out at $1500 a month.

World Ventures also has car bonuses and house bonuses when you hit some of the highest levels in the compensation plan.

So now that you know how the World Ventures marketing plan works, lets see how it matches up to the areas I evaluate in this blog for compensation plans.

1. How easy is it to make $500 to $1000 a month?

You really have no idea how much money you are going to make on travel booked on your website since the commissions vary so significantly. Therefore, your best bet in evaluating your income is to look at how much money you will make selling the memberships

Since you make $50 for each membership you sell, you will need to sell 10 services a month to earn $500. You can either sell 10 services to 10 different customers or you can sell 5 customers both services.

Note - At the time of this writing World Ventures has a limited time promotion where a customer can get BOTH services for the price of one. However, they will need to pay the membership fee for both services. Therefore if the customer buys both services under this promotion, you only make $50 because they are only charging the customer $199 for both instead of $199 for each.

Let's look at the numbers and see what your sign-up ratios will need to be to make 10 sales to 10 different customers...

50% - 20 people a month (5 per week)
25% - 40 people a month (10 per week)
10% - 100 people a month (25 per week)
5% - 200 people a month (50 per week)
1% - 1000 people a month (250 per week)

These numbers are reasonable for a part timer as long as you are signing up at least 10% of the people you get to look at the presentation. To do that, you would need to get at least 5 people a day (5 days a week) to look at a presentation, which is possible for a part timer who is serious and consistent.

2. How much does the product cost and how much does it cost to get started as a distributor?

The travel prices are in line with what other travel companies are charging. You can probably find a website that sells them for cheaper, but it's not like they are charging significantly above what other online travel websites are charging.

The Leisure Travel & Consulting Package is $199 + $19.99 a month. That's way too high in my opinion. As I said before, I can sign up as an affiliate with other travel websites for free and save money by booking travel myself and sharing it with my friends and family.

The World Venture Dreamtrips is $199.95 + $19.95 a month. This is also way too high in my opinion. I can book the same trips on other websites for a little more than what World Ventures is charging.

The only way this would make sense from a customer standpoint is if I was booking a significantly large amount of travel (i.e. 12 trips a year for a couple). How many people do you know go on 12 vacations a year?

To get started in the business, you will need to invest $99.95 one time plus $9.95 a month in the Representative Business System. The Representative Business System (RBS) is an online tool that includes a Personalized Website and Back Office System as well as an online Training Program with essential Sales and Marketing tools to help Representatives build their WorldVentures business.

RBS purchases are not commissionable (this is good...there's another travel company that makes these types of sales commissionable that is in trouble right now because of it.)

In addition to paying this fee, you must also either personally sign up for at least one of the two services and make your monthly membership fee each month OR you must sign up at least one new customer a month to stay active.

So other than the actual travel (i.e. flights, hotels, etc), the prices are way too high in compared to the value you get from them. That is a BIG red flag because what that means is that the only reason why people would pay these prices is so that they can participate in the compensation plan, which is one of the areas state and federal regulators look at in determining whether a company is operating an illegal pyramid scheme.

I would love to know what the percentage of World Ventures customers that subscribe to these two plans are NOT participating in the income opportunity.

3. Is there competition for your products and services?

There is a SIGNIFICANT amount of competition for World Ventures products and services. I already showed you one website (priceline.com) where I can get flights cheaper than what World Ventures charges you. I also showed you how I was able to find a similar package that World Ventures Dreamtrips for only $10 per person more than what World Ventures is charging.

At this point, I cannot recommend that anyone get involved with World Ventures at this point in time. The products are priced too high compared to what you can get otherwise. The company is too young so we don't even know if they are even going to be around a few years from now. There are no residuals until you reach one of the highest levels in the compensation plan.

In addition, MLM travel companies have a history of high failure, more than any other type of MLM company. The reason why is because the commissions made from selling travel are too small to fund a compensation plan.

In fact two of the founders of the company were involved in another travel network marketing (Mike Azcue and Wayne Nugent) called GTT Travel. This company tried to do network marketing to sell travel, failed and had to reorganize to become a traditional travel company. Azcue and Nugent left GTT Travel to start World Ventures.

Until I see some actual examples of deals that I can get booking through World Ventures that I cannot find elsewhere that justifies the $400+ that you have to pay for EACH membership for the 1st year and $200+ that you have to pay for EACH membership, each additional year, there is no way I can recommend this company.

Plus, do you really want to be starting a travel business in a recession? People aren't traveling more in a recession. They are cutting back on their travel during a recession. That is why travel is significantly cheaper than it was even a year ago. Very few people are traveling right now.

There are a number of other companies that I would recommend over World Ventures. In fact, any of the other companies that I reviewed so far (i.e. Avon, Mary Kay, Primerica, Arbonne and Mona Vie) are better options than World Ventures.

However, there is one company that I believe has the best compensation plan in the network marketing industry.

For example, if you sign up 1 customer and they buy both the $199 Leisure Travel & Consulting Package and the $199 Dreamtrips package (after the promotion expires of course), you would earn $100 commission. The customer spends about $400 and you make $100.

However, if I sign up 1 customer for two services that costs $45.95 for the first month, guess how much money I make? I make over $207.

Who do you think is going to make more money? Someone making $100 for a $400 sale or someone making TWICE that for a sale that is TEN times LESS?

You can click here to learn more about the company that I am involved in that has what I believe to be the best MLM compensation plan out of the literally hundreds of MLM companies that I have looked at.

If you're already involved in World Ventures you can sign up for my free report that will share with you the 7 strategies that I personally use to build an endless amount of prospects to talk to. These strategies can be used for ANY MLM company, including World Ventures. This report has a $67 value, but you can get it today for free.

If you are reading this blog at a point in the future and the report is no longer free, I'm sorry but you just missed out. So if it's still available sign up today and get it for free while it's still available.