U.S. federal and state governments form the "largest travel buyer in the world" with expenditures of about $20 billion, or 1 percent of global travel spending, according to Travelport CEO and president Jeff Clarke. Government travel buyers need to use that buying power to demand better service, technology and innovation, he told a gathering of the Society of Government Travel Professionals here this month.
"Insist on new technologies. Build it into your request for proposals. Make your vendors deliver the innovation" that is occurring in other industries, Clarke said. The oil industry has improved its ability to extract oil to reduce costs by 40 percent over the past decade, he added. Driven by "Moore's law," an observation (written by Gordon Moore in 1965) that computer processing speed and memory capacity doubles every 18 months, the computing industry has released markedly improved, lower cost technologies for decades--as evidenced by laptops--Clarke said.
"I'd like to have a Moore's law for travel where the experience needs to improve or double every 18 months, said Clarke. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have the technology and innovation in this industry that's been dormant for so long."
"Yet in the travel industry, more of a service industry, overall service is significantly worse than it was 10 years ago," he added. The travel industry is run much as it was 10 to 15 years ago, with little enhancement to customer service or the experience for travelers, Clarke said.
Pointing to examples, Clarke commended SGTP for opposing airline plans to charge baggage fees to soldiers. "I thought it was fantastic when this organization stood up and said our soldiers are not going to pay a bag fee when they're serving this country. Thank goodness you stood up and look how fast the industry reacted when you did. You have the ability to shift" industry service standards, Clarke observed.
Yet, government travel buyers have not demanded that the Transportation Security Administration create a separate line at airports to speed federal travelers through the myriad of federal security clearances onto planes. "Isn't it interesting that we have security clearance for many of your employees to get into highly secure military installations, yet we don't have the ability to get them into a special line at security to get on airplanes. If we can trust them with uranium, the front lines of our wars, we should be able to trust them" to get through airport security, Clarke noted.
Government travel buyers also have the ability to "influence how the airline or hotel industry operates with overbooking, bumping" or other unfulfilled reservations, said Clarke. "You have the ability to shift when players aren't meeting standards. Wouldn't it be wonderful if your organization could say to one of the 10 hotel chains or eight major airlines, 'We're not going to do any business with you for a month because of the service levels that you've gone to.' Can you imagine how fast that would force them to move? This is the opportunity that you have."
Clarke also urged buyers to demand improved technology readily available in the marketplace and used by many corporations--such as ticket exchanges and traveler tracking. He noted that Travelport's global distribution systems serve only 20 percent of U.S. federal business, while Sabre Travel Network commands the other 80 percent. In the case of traveler tracking, he said, "my understand is that this is not readily available to most of your agencies. This technology exists. You have to ask your vendors for it. These are the kind of products that when you're negotiating with travel agents, with Carlson Wagonlit, which is a partner of ours and has implemented it for most of its corporate customers--but not for the government--you need to push for. You want innovation."
Clarke also urged federal buyers to lead on sustainability issues. "If the government isn't going to lead this, it's going to be very hard to see someone else step up and really show the responsibility on sustainable travel."