I had a business partner show me World Ventures today. One glaringly obvious thing worries me: How is it that anyone expects to drive traffic to their websites? You need to see traffic and bookings to make any real money at this. So, if every personalized WV website looks the same, how does one distinguish themselves in the huge global online market place? It's not enough to just get other members to sign up. If you want to see commissions, you need to see sales on your website. Since there's thousands of these private-labeled WV sites, how does anyone expect to get people to buy vacation packages from their site instead of someone else's? You can't rely on search engines to drive traffic to your site because yours is no more unique than any other WV site. You would actually have to do some real face-to-face selling of Dream Vacations to see any substantial amount of sales on your site. You might as well call it door-to-door sales or Cutco knife sales because there's no substantial difference. This business structure simply cannot be sustained only by its membership fees and the signing up of new members. If everyone is a salesperson and has special access to the goods, who is the customer buying the goods? If WV is to succeed, it must have a large portion of its income coming from vacation package sales, not just member sign-up fees. A business needs to fill a niche, and this simply doesn't. It's only good at getting bloated real fast.

I make my living as a web developer and am a Computer Science graduate with a Business Administration minor. If anyone that gets in on this just expects people to happen across THEIR site while looking for travel deals, they're dead wrong. This involves more work than the enticers let on. I'm not saying that one can't make money at it, but don't expect to just buy in and watch your website make money for you; you'd be cheating yourself to believe that. Be prepared for some old-fashioned pavement-pounding if you expect it to pay off. Also, you'd better hope the company (WV) doesn't collapse. They are, after all, an LLC, not a corporation, which seems a bit sketchy for an operation of this magnitude.

You'd be wise to snatch up a catchy domain name, which you can forward to your yourname.worldventures.com site. But then, since you have no control over the layout and style of the WV site, you need to contend with customer trust issues. If you tell someone to go to patrickstravel.com and it forwards to patricksomebody.worldventures.com, your potential customer may be very confused and never even book a package with you. There are major trust issues at play in online commerce that simply are not very well addressed with the WV system.

PLUS, on top of all those difficult odds, you have to contend with the enormous mind share that the large well-known travel companies have with the general populous. I don't even have to name them because you already know who they are. I can hear their jingles now...

The important thing to note is that WV takes way more work than most presenters reveal. I can see how many folks would walk away from the presentation (and possibly a sign-up) thinking "This is great! All I have to do is get a few people under me and wait for website to make money!" WRONG. And this should be more clearly stated by presenters. That would also mean a major restructuring of WV's business model, which doesn't seem very likely at this time.

- traveltastic