The Sub Plot: How Sub-Agents Are Reshaping the Travel Industry

In her fifth year in business, independent contractor Meredith Tudor is hoping to double sales at her agency, Simple Traveler Vacations, to $2 million. But she knows she can’t do it alone. So she is signing on sub-agents whom she will train and mentor—and to whom she will provide back office and social media services, and refer clients—in return for a share of their commissions.  

In so doing, Tudor is joining a growing number of ICs who host ICs of their own. Unlike more usual host agencies, these promise an environment that is small, personal, hands-on and entrepreneurial. And with four sub-agents already onboard, Tudor says her own business has taken off.  

“There’s a lot of chatter about why you shouldn’t be an IC, so we thought what if we did something different? What if we created a space where ICs can grow and specialize while we do the heavy lifting? We are hoping to create retention and really excellent agents by creating an agency made up of distinct divisions where they have ownership but we do the social media and the back office, and give them leads,” she told TMR. 

Tudor credits a chance conversation about SEO (“just think of what someone might be searching for and build a website for that”) for the idea behind her for the first division, Alaska Cruise Planning.  

“When I started out, it was just me, making $600 in commission my first year. But Alaska was 50% of our business in our first three years—and when we started Alaska Cruise Planning, my specialist IC there made almost $10,000 in her first year,” she says.  

She already has a specialist IC who will handle her next destination, Hawaii. After that will come Europe and river cruising. 

“We want to create a space where people can come sell what they love and build their business, and we help bring in leads for the destination they are passionate about,” she says. 

Is It Just an MLM?  

Still, some ask, is the model really different from an MLM, where advisors earn money by bringing in newcomers rather than by actually selling travel? 

“If you really want to grow your company, you have to hire people to bring in the volume,” Tudor says. “But where the goal of the MLM model is to have as many people as possible on the team, I’m not just adding people to make money. I’m selling travel. And I’m hiring the right people within each specialty to help me do that.”  

Handling High Net Worth 

Former travel journalist McLean Robbins, meanwhile, got so many requests for help from her high-net-worth readers that 10 years ago she started “what I thought would be a side hustle” to book their trips. By 2025, Lily Pond Luxury Travel was selling $11 million, with the help of nine sub-ICs she hand-picked from among her hotel industry contacts.  

“It’s become increasingly common for agencies to have a team of their own,” she says. For her, the motivation was twofold: Her corporate background, where she enjoyed the camaraderie of mentoring large teams, and her high-net-worth client base, where “it’s virtually impossible to do it all yourself. Having other sellers allows us to entertain a broader swath of clients and also ensure that the specificities of our clients are met.”  

The team at Lily Pond includes an IC married to a Michelin-starred chef and another who spends a month every year living in Austria; “everyone has a destination specialty and a focus,” she says. Each maintains her own client base—but the team approach has allowed each to see her sales double or triple every year for the first five years, Robbins says.   

To retain them, she offers a commission split “that is, candidly, higher than they would get if they went out on their own. And the reality is that many people like to work in the business but not on it. They don’t want to do the marketing and the back office; they just want to work with clients. Here they get that camaraderie but also can be extremely successful.” 

Robbins believes in the model so much that she brought about a change at her host agency, Travel Experts in Raleigh, NC. Last month Travel Experts announced a new Team program and fee structure for sub-ICs under which each advisor’s sales are recorded separately, and the team can set its own commission split.  

The sub-IC model “is a trend I identified and brought to the Travel Experts board, and we worked to come up with a solution,” Robbins says. “It’s not a back-door way to get a lower fee. It’s a way to grow the business.”  

Travel advisor Kathy Mueller was one of the first Travel Experts ICs to have a team of her own. She started her agency 15 years ago, after 10 years at a brick-and-mortar, and brought her first sub-IC on when she hit $1 million. Now she has a team of four, including her son.  

“I shared all my knowledge and gave them all my new clients when they first started,” she says, and they brought their own contacts as well. Now each works on her own clients.  

“I don’t tell them what to do; I make suggestions and they make suggestions. For us, the benefit is being part of a team”—including being invited to events and putting together their own fam trips. 

By offering a discounted fee, the new Travel Leaders team program encourages people to bring on other agents, she says. “It makes a big difference in acknowledging that we are a little bit different, a little bit special.” 

While her youngest sub-IC already has graduated into opening an business of her own,  “the others say no, they have no interest in changing anything.”