Special fromThe Beat.
The U.S. General Services Administration last month posted a massive solicitation for the next generation of its E-Gov Travel System, ETS2, and it expects proposals by Oct. 6 for travel management services covering more than 70 federal agencies. Contracts would have a base period of three years with three optional four-year extensions, potentially resulting in 15-year relationships.
"The purpose of this solicitation is to provide a vehicle for all government agencies to obtain end-to-end travel management service that automates and consolidates the federal travel process in a secure Web-centric environment," according to the government's summary. "ETS2 includes all aspects of official federal business travel, including travel planning, authorization, reservations, ticketing, fulfillment, expense reimbursement and travel management service, which serves as the foundation for achieving federal goals for government-wide travel management."
GSA also plans to update interested parties on the date and locale for a pre-proposal conference, which should take place within the next two weeks, according to published information. The posted solicitation was originally scheduled for release in January.
The solicitation is a package of 30 documents with several hundred pages of text, matrices and flow charts, and includes expected, rudimentary components like definitions of self-service versus agent-assisted transactions and details on service-level agreements for customer satisfaction and performance.
But the request for proposal also discloses some of GSA's newer-fangled objectives as it contemplates changes during the life of the contracts.
"ETS2 will ensure the delivery of user-friendly, customer-centric, configurable, policy-compliant, reliable and secure federal travel services using a contractor-owned, hosted and operated model, e.g., an Application Service Provider (ASP) or Software as a Service (SaaS)," according to the document. "In addition, ETS2 supports the Federal Enterprise Architecture, National Information Exchange Model and the concept of secure software service solutioning. ETS2 is positioned to incorporate and leverage, for the benefit of the federal government, emerging offerings of future cloud computing that include on-demand self service, ubiquitous network access, location-independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured-service performance."
GSA is asking bidders to provide a version of ETS2 that would be available on mobile platforms, access non-global distribution system content and support the government's "go green" initiatives by tracking and reporting "carbon footprint details." To accomplish that last item, bidders would have to enable bookings for "telepresence alternatives to travel" and provide "the ability to compare the cost and emissions of travel with the cost and environmental impact of telepresence and capture this data for reporting and analysis."
In addition, according to GSA, "the contractor should exploit emerging standards, such as the Electronic Miscellaneous Document (EMD), to more effectively manage and account for ancillary fees charged by airlines and other travel suppliers. ETS2 should electronically capture ancillary fees charged by airlines to the extent possible from transaction details provided. The contractor should further, to the extent possible, be able to classify these fees according to applicable purchase and fee types."
Meanwhile, the solicitation indicates that although the much-maligned Defense Travel Systemimplemented by the military is not part of the initial solicitation, "the scope of this contract does not preclude the Department of Defense from participating in this effort after expiration of its current DTS contract."
GSA's current ETS contracts, in place with lead contractors CW Government Travel (Carlson Wagonlit Sato Travel), EDS (now HP) and Northrop Grumman Information Systems, can be extended through November 2013.