Washington - The
U.S. General Services Administration is turning to
corporate travel managers for suggestions on how to overhaul its 200-page travel policy document, according to a GSA representative speaking here at the
Society of Government Travel Professionals conference.
GSA on Sept. 20-21 will host "two industry days where
we are asking private industry to come in and educate us," said GSA travel
policy program director Lois Mandell. "As we work on this revision effort,
let's make sure we are doing the right thing and not just adding more."
GSA can overhaul its travel policy only if Congress passes
legislation that permits it. As a result, GSA several times in recent years
amended and added to the policy document, but has not written a new one. Such
alterations led to policy discrepancies and overlapping or repetitive language,
according to Mandell.
The revision process may result in multiple policies,
Mandell said, possibly including separate documents for conference regulations
and green travel guidelines, for example. GSA plans to incorporate language on
vehicle sharing and hourly car rentals as part of its goal to reduce carbon
emissions by 28 percent by 2013.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense is aligning with GSA
to slash hundreds of pages from its own 1,000-page policy.
"We got here over the last seven decades by putting
rules together to address different situations," said Pamela Mitchell,
director of the Defense Travel Management Office and a speaker at the SGTP
conference. "No one ever sat back and said, 'We should take a
comprehensive look at what we are doing.' We are extremely serious about
literally transforming the way we do things, and we don't mean that in a
revolutionary sense but rather in an evolutionary sense. While we set about
transforming, we can't afford to break anything for our travelers, for the
department or for our partner."
DoD is monitoring the development of GSA's E-Gov Travel
Service 2.0 travel and expense management system to emulate best practices for
its planned update of the Defense Travel System.
After pushing back the bid-submission deadline to July, GSA
expects to award the ETS2 contract next spring, according to GSA Office of
Travel and Transportation program director Gene Lee.
Steve Singh, chairman and CEO of ETS2 bidder Concur, during
a recent earnings call predicted the process would "come down to two
bidders"—his company and ETS incumbent Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Singh
estimated the 15-year ETS2 contract would be worth $1.5 billion, roughly $100
million a year. "We are optimistic we could get a piece of that," he told
investors.