A Travel Guides pay scandal has emerged after two of its most recognisable stars have blown the lid off the grim financial reality of filming the series.
Speaking on the Smoko Room podcast, former stars Mel and Stack revealed the dire pay they received for filming six seasons between 2017 and 2023, and why it eventually led to them walking away from the popular show.
“There just wasn’t enough money in it. You can’t go away for six months of the year, maintain a mortgage and f***ing live,” Mel explained in the chat. “We did it for seven years and I said to Stack, ‘We’re going to have to either pull the pin [or] ask for more money… so we asked for more money and they didn’t handle that real well.”
Mel, who at the time had only just given birth to her daughter Savannah, then admitted to growing irate when producers told her to “just leave her [Savannah] at home and come travel.”
“I was like, ‘Get f***ed!’” she exclaimed. “I just couldn’t afford my mortgage and I left Savannah’s dad when she was quite young so I’ve been a single parent ever since and I just couldn’t afford it. So I was like, ‘Well, the TV stuff has to go’ and I had to bunker down and put my little girl first.”
Mel’s twin sister Stack then took a swipe at her former castmates, saying that while she and Mel were just “average joe blows”, everyone else on the show was able to make the dismal salaries work as they were “sort of financially stable”.
“Yeah, we’re not silver-spoon fed f***ers so we have to go to work and hustle. And if we can’t pay our own bills off our own back we have no one to ask,” Mel added.
“For the first 12 months there was nothing, you had to carry your own back and then season two and season three… it wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage, put it that way – and I do not have a big mortgage.”
The sisters’ comments are said to have opened a can of worms, with an insider saying it’s prompted other cast members to question their own financial situations.
“It’s definitely generated a lot of chatter among them,” the source tells Woman’s Day. “People might say contestants should just be grateful, that travelling for free should be enough compensation. But when you’re spending weeks away from your family, juggling a mortgage and putting your life on hold, it’s easy to understand why earning very little doesn’t feel like enough.”
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