TVI Express Review of Compensation Plan

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NOTE ABOUT TVI:

This review was written prior to uncovering that fact that TVI Express has not delivered on their product promises.

You may want to review one of my other posts on this:

Here is this post as originally written:

TVI Express is basically a discount travel club. The Sam’s Club of travel if you will. a $275 membership fee gets you a lifetime membership with a 110% lowest price guaranty. This means if you book your travel through TVIs booking engine, which I found to be simpler to use that Travelocity and Expedia and Priceline, and you find a cheaper price for the same accommodations, TVI will refund the difference plus 10% of the difference. In other words, they match the price and give you 10% of that difference back as well. Also, as a member you get a one time 6 night, 7 day vacation in a 3 to 5 star hotel anywhere in the world. This also includes a domestic return flight. I would say that would easily triple the investment.

TVI Express indicates on their website that they are active in over 150 countries and provides a list. They also have a real time running display to show you the sign ups which are happening right now. This is pretty cool.

If you dig a bit you can find some quite astounding claims about TVI Express. I got an email the other day from an individual who said that TVI Express has created over 60 millionaires in India alone. TVI Express was first opened for buiness in India and China, so if it has produced millionaires in India that would be logical, but very difficult to verify. The same email claimed that TVI Express has acquired over 500,000 new distributors since it’s inception in January of 2009. Well, I did do quite a bit of research, via both the the official TVI Express website, and via email and Skype with quite a few TVI Express distributors. Without spending 10,000 words droning on about all the communications I had along this line let it suffice to say that, as far as I could verify, those two claims above are false. Perhaps just a bit of exaggeration on the part of the guy who sent me the email. He is clearly reaching as hard as he can to impress for the benefit of his marketing efforts.

I does say in the TVI Express opportunity presentation that TVI has broken network marketing records including over $3 million in sales their first month in business.

I could not seem to verify with any degree of accuracy the total number of millionaires made in TVI Express. I did happen to meet a guy that earned over $150K in his first 12 weeks or so, and another guy who currently has his earnings up over $100K per month, so it is safe to say that millionaires are being made but I could not locate an exact number to report.

I found that it is somewhat difficult to locate details regarding the company founders and leadership. TVI Express is a private company, not publicly traded, so I suppose privacy is an issue that is totally up to the leaders themselves. One TVI distributor I talked to, one of the first people to actually bring TVI Express to the USA, mentioned that there seemed to be some concern about mafia activities in the UK and in Cypress, where TVI Express has their main administration and banking locations. In other words, it sees that privacy was considered more important to the founders due to the risk of “shake down” in those areas. This is not so important as the question of — is everyone getting paid as they are supposed to. I could find no instances of anyone claiming that they did not get paid as they should.

Citizens Corp – Home Business Review did post quite a raving review of TVI Express. They said that TVI was only the second company in history to get their 5-Star rating.

The compensation Plan for TVI Express is four faceted. The bulk of the commissions result from recruiting enrollees so as to fill the bottom 8 positions of a 15 position board. The board is basically a triangle with four rows, eight slots at the bottom and one spot at the top. When the board fills, the guy at the top gets paid and the board splits in two and this results in two new boards, both with eight empty spots on the bottom row. Then the same thing occurs. It is the goal of the remaining seven people on the board to fill the empty 8 slots in order to split the board and pay the top position. The first time around the payout is $500 and the 2nd time and every time after that is $10,000 plus a $5000 travel voucher for two. After one gets their first $10,000 commission they just cycle right back onto another board, always following their direct sponsor, and the same cycle occurs over and over to infinity.

There are no recurring cost, no autoship cost as there is no product to ship. There is residual income however as you do get a percentage of your downline’s revenue once you have graduated from the second Board. And the residual percentage increases a bit each time you cycle off the board again, up to 10% of your downline’s revenue.

The third method of payment are the incentives. TVI Express indicates some pretty outlandish incentives on their website, one of which is a private jet, a yacht, etc. These are awarded after one cycles some ungodly number of times. I don’t recall how many.

The other way of getting paid is from what they call a Power Pool, which is basically pool of money which builds as 2% of the planetary revenue is contributed to the pool. The compensation plan on the TVI Express website does not say how often Power Pool commissions are paid out but it does say that once one is at the Presidential level, where one can receive this bonus, he would also be granted a position on the advisory board for the company. That’s a new one on me!

But back to the fundamentals. The premise of the TVI Express opportunity is the concept of just recruiting two people. You get two, then help them get two, etc., and the boards cycle. Sounds like a good theory. For those of you who have been in network marketing for a while you know that it probably is more likely to have a situation where you get two and one of them does absolutely nothing and the other recruits one. Surely you will find leaders who will make up for the slugs, but TVI seems to have accounted for that as well with something they call spill over. So if your upline sponsors two and then some, the third, fourth, and so on benefit you and your downline directly even if they are not personally recruiting. The reason for this is in the way the boards work. TVI Express does not have a pyramid or a binary matrix that just goes on forever. They have a 15 position board. Everyone on the board, and everyone on the boards above are working to fill the original board, called the Traveler Board, and this pushes the group upward onto the next board so the entire operation keeps cycling. This means that the superstars can carry the sluggards to some degree. Good for those that are not MLM recruiting masters. At first I thought this was not really fair to the superstar recruiting machines but in working out the way in which the Boards work, it isn’t much of a problem as the board is filling and paying commissions. The only way anyone is getting paid is by filling the boards and the superstars know this coming in. It would give a more productive person incentive to motivate the slower folks so that just a few top producers are not just carrying the whole lot. But isn’t that how it goes in life anyway?