GSA pushes federal travelers to book reservations online

Federal agencies must push more of their employees to book travel reservations online, under a General Services Administration bulletin issued to federal leaders Wednesday.

The bulletin urges agencies to sign up for a Transportation Department system called FedTrip if they don't already have online booking services in place. With services such as FedTrip, employees can set up air, hotel and car rental reservations themselves, rather than going through travel agents. "Providing an online booking service is the initial phase of reengineering the entire travel process to realize significant cost savings to the government, to improve employees' productivity and to provide a unified, simplified official travel process," said the March 20 bulletin from G. Martin Wagner, GSA's associate administrator for the Office of Governmentwide Policy. The bulleting appeared in the March 20 Federal Register.

Wagner also asked agency officials to develop plans for increasing the use of online booking services. Agencies are expected to submit a report by the end of the year describing actions taken to "achieve high-level usage" of online booking, though the bulletin does not define "high-level."

The push for booking online is part of the Bush administration's e-government initiative, which aims to move many government services and processes online over the next few years. Federal agencies spend $9 billion a year on travel, much of which is booked through traditional travel agencies. A Federal Aviation Administration fact sheet claims that online booking through FedTrip is half as expensive as booking travel over the phone with travel agents.

GSA has issued a request for proposals for a contractor to develop a governmentwide e-travel system that would cover all aspects of business travel administration, including travel planning, authorization, reservations and voucher reconciliation. Officials expect to award a contract and have an e-travel system up and running by the end of the year.

GSA's bulletin urging agencies to use FedTrip or other online booking services for the reservations portion of the process is a temporary measure until the new system is ready.

Bidding on the end-to-end system may be quite competitive; 127 industry representatives attended a GSA briefing on the contract to build the system earlier this month. Some observers have questioned whether agencies should be required to start using an online booking service now, when they may have to switch to a new service if the end-to-end system is ready in nine months.

But a similar effort at the Defense Department has been fraught with delays, suggesting that GSA's new system may not be ready on schedule. The Defense Travel System, designed to be a single automated system for all Defense travelers, is five years behind schedule and has cost the government $190 million. And it's only being used at 18 of the department's 11,000 worldwide sites.

Meanwhile, the Transportation Department developed FedTrip a few years ago, using a system developed by TRX Inc., an Atlanta, Ga.-based firm. Tim Burke, the GSA official in charge of the e-travel effort, helped develop FedTrip in his previous job at the Transportation Department. TRX says that at least 10 agencies are using FedTrip, including Transportation, GSA, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Science Foundation.

Other agencies use different systems, but GSA officials say that eventually all agencies will be required to use GSA's end-to-end travel system. "Agencies are cautioned against investment in new systems that will be agency-specific and nontransferable to the e-travel service," the bulletin says.