Several Travelogia fans wrote to complain that the WWSN had not done their homework and that we were being unfair to Travelogia.com:

Keep in mind that Rod "MLM Watchdog" Cook endorses Travelogia.com as he has few other MLM programs, saying:

We are not so enthusiastic and here's why:

The Travelogia.com Timeline

Pre-Travelogia

Before Travelogia there was (and still is) Qixo.com, which owns the software, servers, and programming that runs the search engine which powers the Travelogia.com "Boarding Pass".

Some conjecture here, based on circumstantial evidence:

Greg Neely had sold his cell phone business for more than $100 million and went looking for an investment. Along comes Adam Gilmer who proposes a partnership to promote a new travel MLM based on the existing Qixo.com - and using Gregg Neely's money.

After all, Adam Gilmer had promoted another travel scheme - "The Travel Club" - and presents himself on the Internet as a "Network Marketing Professional".

Adam Gilmer Lifestyle

Using his own self-promotion and building on his lackluster experience with "The Travel Club", he no doubt made a strong presentation for a major league money maker in his proposals to Greg Neely.

A standard bio for Mr. Gilmer always includes:

A Columbia State University MBA graduate in Marketing Management & Communications...

Trouble is, Columbia State University is nothing more than a diploma mill and Adam's MBA degree is a worthless fraud.

Furthermore, we have learned that Adam Gilmore is not even an American citizen and is living in this country with an expired visa.

Adam and Greg arranged to purchase a controlling interest in Qixo.com while Gilmore proceeded to build the Travelogia facade and began his campaign to enlist the help of established Internet marketing "Legends" like Malcolm Wallace, Rik McCoy, Stuart Purcell and Simon Vietri.

Travelogia.com is Born!

According to our sources who know Adam Gilmer personally, he offered several top people free entrance into the Travelogia.com matrix AND offered to pay them $5,000 per month to recruit people into his scheme, to the tune of $25,000 per month. Meanwhile, Greg Neely started writing checks for Travelogia business operations in the amount of around $200,000 a month.

Adam Gilmer knew he would have to develop a more comprehensive "product" for network marketing. He know they need to offer more than just cheap fares to increase their customer base and energize the MLM downline empire builders.

Having seen the success of third party coupon and certificate programs focusing on "Free Gas", such as GasUP USA, APP Gas and FuelZone.com, they added their own third party coupon, voucher, and certificate programs to the "Travelogia.com" product line-up.

The Travelogia.com Push Begins

Now they've got what looks like a good product - and Qixo.com DOES have a good program and a popular service - along with a bunch of third party loss leader programs (which have very little intrinsic value) to dress up their package:

"The "loss leader" marketing concept, experimented for the first time in the early '70, is still a niche in the world of marketing but the statistical data on consumer's behavior has so far unveiled amazing results when the campaign is properly structured and accurately monitored

Historically the highest redemption ratio never crosses the 2% independently from the nature, the perception and the mass-appeal of the value offered by the promotional item utilized. In other words the opportunity to add a significant additional revenue stream deriving from so called "breakage income" is actually very tangible and realistic." - Loss Leader Marketing - TravelClub International

Next the word goes out on the Internet - a new sizzle MLM offering travel, free vacations, trip discounts, blah, blah, blah...

Faster than you can say, "Mark Yarnell", the MLM scam masters and junkies come streaming in (and the SkyBiz con artists are only four of the most notorious and well known). Soon afterwards honest network marketers see what appears to be a great opportunity; they check out the people who own the company, look at what is being offered, perhaps meet some of the top people at a convention, and get really excited about this new MLM and begin recruiting members for their own downline (or even free members, which is part of the requirement to qualify for "Club Executive" commissions).

The Travelogia.com program is cleverly designed and the compensation plans are jazzed up with exotic lingo and multiple pay plans so that even an experienced network marketer could get confused - but their flash presentation does not discuss anything out of the Club Executive context. There DOES seems to be a way that one could join for FREE as a "Banner Affiliate" and still collect commissions for travel booked from your web site "banner" or from your personally enrolled OLMs (Online Members). Numbers are never presented for this scenario, but the $5,000 a day - $25,000 a week income is presented as a real possibility for Club Executives who fill their matrix and binaries.

The WWSN Takes Note

When we started getting e-mails about Travelogia.com, several mentioned that "Malcolm Wallace" or "Rik McCoy" and other SkyBiz scammers had joined and were promoting this new program. And history will show that these MLM "Legends" never join a program unless they are certain they will be able exploit and manipulate it to their own benefit. If they are in a program, it is almost certainly a scam in progress.

But promoters will point out that Travelogia.com requires TRAINING and members are TESTED! You have to QUALIFY to get your CLIA and ITA membership cards.

So we signed up as a free "Banner Affiliate", quickly downloaded the "Training Manual" and accessed the open book "Test". Anyone could qualify in ten minutes, if they wanted to. We also downloaded the "2003 CLIA Photo ID Card Application" and could easily fill it out, send in a check for $18.00 and have a CLIA card in no time. And we have paid nothing and done nothing to deserve it. How is this possible, you might ask?

Because Travelogia.com signs everybody up under THEIR CLIA membership number. Here's how it's done:

So it is a simple matter to become an accredited "Travel Agent" without joining Travelogia.com, with all the CLIA benefits and discounts. And we will agree that it might be possible to earn small commissions from selling travel through your banner, web site, or through your own OLM signups. And you can ALREADY use the same software to search for cheap tickets on Qixo.com for free.

So why become a "Club Executive"?

The recruitment commission scheme money game - that is ALL that is left. Each member invests around $1,238 dollars annually into the company coffers (which includes $69.99 PER MONTH for a self-replicating web site that we already have received for FREE as a "Banner Affiliate") and the computers dole out commissions according to the various comp plan "modules".

SkyBizzers and MLM junkies just LOVE these schemes. You sign up new recruits, you receive commissions from them and their downline, and their downline, and their downline, ad infinitum, until saturation and collapse. Then the FTC steps in while Adam Gilmer, Malcolm Wallace and his buddies leave town in a hurry with offshore account numbers to go looking for their next great MLM opportunity...

And Greg Neely is left behind to pick up the tab....

Travelogia.com - in spite of many good honest and well intentioned people - is nothing more than a state-of-the-art recruitment commission scheme. It's a fancy version of GasUP USA, with their third party gasoline discounts, travel and vacation certificates. And the end result will be the same.

But WAIT! You are probably thinking....

Even if we are right, we've agreed that a free member could earn money from other free members and a Club Executive could earn money from free members, along with the generous recruitment commissions. So according to our own standards, since a member at any level can make money without recruiting anyone, it cannot be classified as a pyramid scheme - they are selling real products and services!

And this might be enough of a standard to protect Travelogia.com for a short while...

Then we tried out the Travelogia.com search engine for a flight from Dallas to St. Paul and got their cheapest ticket price of $266.

Next we tried a search at Qixo.com and got back a cheaper price of $246!

All of the Travelogia.com fares are exactly $20.00 HIGHER than the cheapest fares available through Qixo.com. And it turns out that this is the exact fee which Qixo.com tacks on to the backend of your ticket purchase. But is this honestly the LOWEST price available for a flight from Dallas to St. Paul that date and time?

Expedia.com quoted a price of $246 INCLUDING a $5.00 booking fee.

And Priceline.com said they could get the ticket for a total of $247.95, which includes their $6.95 processing charge.

Both services are easy to access and highly advertised and visible online services - both for about $20 less. Qixo and Travelogia mark up the best available prices by $20 for an instantaneous electronic transaction which Expedia charges $5.00 for and Priceline charges $6.95.

The claim of "lowest prices on the Internet" is not true - the $1.00 Boarding Pass commission comes out of the same $20 Qixo.com charges through their web site - the auxiliary third party services and products are loss leaders and virtually worthless...

Yes, you could make a few dollars as a Travelogia.com member, if enough people come to YOUR replicated web site (instead of one of the other 10,000 and growing Travelogia replicated web sites) and use their free "boarding pass". And that money comes out of the 10% surcharge added to the cheapest ticket price. But you won't make enough to answer this question from their Flash business presentation:

This is identical to the BigSmart.com pyramid scheme, where people were promised big residual incomes from people shopping at their Internet shopping malls. But merchant commissions were minuscule and a long time coming. What fueled BigSmart was the sale of the malls themselves at around $309 each. Commissions from sales of products were virtually non-existent, as were the refunds even after the FTC shut them down.

Once people realize that the promise of Travelogia/Qixo.com is a lie, how many people are likely to purchase tickets using the "Boarding Pass" when they can save $20 a ticket at Expedia.com or one of the other many online services? Just how good is their "patent pending" software if it can't even access the same ticket prices that Expedia and Priceline does?

Adam Gilmer leases 10,000 feet of office space with capital misappropriated from Greg Neely, but lives in a one bedroom apartment and does not even own his own car. He screwed over two of his top promoters - Hank Feingold and Mark Caplan - so badly, they both quit the program, even though they had recruited about 50% of the Travelogia membership up to that point.

Jon Snyder, President of Travel Services has quit Travelogia.

Lew Ludlow, Director of Operations has quit Travelogia.

Dwayne V. Davis, Co-Founder/Vice President of Sales & Marketing was fired as a scapegoat when accounting books did not balance and Greg Neely was getting suspicious.

No sales = no income = end of Travelogia.com memberships = end of Travelogia.com.

Once the bubble bursts on the myth of Qixo.com technology and their inflated prices, the game is over and all that is left is the "Club Executive" recruitment commission scheme.

Which is all it was ever designed to be from the start.

That is not only illegal and a red flag for the FTC - it is unsustainable and doomed for failure. Let's hope that Greg Neely gets the message before the rest of his $100,000,000 is gone...

These are the reasons we will continue to recommend that people avoid Travelogia.com. Just as we did with GMT!, SkyBiz, BigSmart, Going Platinum and many other MLM pyramid schemes.