GSA panel recommends outsourcing federal lodging program

The government should contract out its lodging program, according to an advisory panel on federal travel.

On Friday, the Governmentwide Per Diem Advisory Board released its list of 45 recommendations for streamlining the government's per diem and lodging programs. The General Services Administration created the board in May 2002 and its 13 members come from the travel industry as well as the state and federal governments.

"This board has been instrumental in GSA's continuing process to streamline and improve federal travel management," said GSA Administrator Stephen Perry.

The biggest change to the program includes a proposal to outsource a governmentwide lodging program. Bill Rivers, vice chairman of the advisory board and director of GSA's Office of Federal Vehicle Management Policy, said GSA would seek union support for the idea.

More than 93,000 federal employees travel each day to more than 8,000 destinations, and federal officials have faced several challenges in designing a governmentwide lodging program and finding an accurate method for setting per diem rates. Currently, the standard rate for cities who do not have their own per diem is $55 for lodging and $30 for meals and incidental expenses.

"We tried to base our decisions on finding a system that would work wherever we went in the United States," said Rivers, who also serves as program executive for GSA's Federal Premier Lodging Program. "We talked to lodging and travel industry officials to get advice on what the best practices are to see if we could take that and duplicate and replicate it in the federal government."

Last year GSA launched the Federal Premier Lodging Program, which includes 34 of the country's largest cities, and the agency hopes to have the program in place in 77 cities by the end of this year. Under FPLP, hotels guarantee that a certain number of rooms will be available within the applicable per diem rates. There was no guarantee that such rates would be available before the creation of FPLP.

Other recommendations from the per diem advisory board included using lodging industry sources to determine an average daily rate for hotels and then removing properties from the lodging program that are considerably higher or lower than that number. Board members also recommended using zip names to more clearly define per diem areas. Zip names are geographic names assigned to each zip code. Soliciting more feedback from federal travelers about the per diem and lodging programs was also among the recommendations of the advisory board.

GSA will review the recommendations, meeting with both unions and federal agency travel officials before deciding which ideas to adopt, Rivers said. "We don't want to come to any conclusions without input," he said.