The U.S. General Services Administration this month expects to deliver a request for proposals for the next generation of its Web-based federal travel program, E-Gov Travel Service, according to officials speaking here at a Society of Government Travel Professionals conference. Despite a three-month delay to the formal start of the bid-solicitation process, GSA officials said vendors would be selected by November and expect the first federal agency contract for ETS2 to be signed by January 2011. While GSA is charged with negotiating master contracts for and overseeing delivery of ETS, each federal agency issues task orders to contract for services with a vendor or subcontract under another federal agency's contract.
GSA reiterated its desire to consolidate to just one or two vendors as opposed to its current three--CW Government Travel (Carlson Wagonlit Sato Travel), Electronic Data Systems (now HP Enterprise Services) and Northrop Grumman Information Systems--and plans to contract for a longer period than the current 10-year agreements to ease the platform-migration process for the larger federal agencies. Late last year GSA said "23 of 24 Business Reference Model agencies are either fully or partially deployed," and 38 other agencies are fully deployed on ETS.
"There is an emphasis this time to consolidate the market," said Frank Robinson, GSA FAS acting division director within the center for travel management. "The ETS vendors themselves are saying there needs to be fewer of us. Some of them are saying there should be one."
During his presentation, Robinson noted that federal agencies and the travel "industry support a potential for a longer-term contract. The agencies in particular are saying that if you award a master contract, it takes them 18 months to two years to get an interface developed and get folks trained," he said. "Then, three or four years prior to the end of the contract, you start market research again. That leaves about three to four years of peace. They are in favor of a longer contract."
The Process
Despite announcing the RFP would be issued earlier this year, Robinson maintained that the GSA bid-solicitation process is "according to schedule" and is "confident that we will mostly likely make a [vendor] reward somewhere around the first of the calendar year, give or take a month or so."
Starting the process years in advance enables larger federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Agriculture, ample time to migrate to the newer platform, Robinson said. "ETS is not going to expire for another three years, and everyone is saying, 'Well aren't you a bit ahead of yourself,' " he noted. "Agencies are telling us, in particular the larger ones, that it will take them three or four years to fully migrate from ETS to ETS2. We need this time to effectively make this transition in an orderly manner so that the travelers aren't inconvenienced in the conversion."
ETS2 vendors will be selected based upon their ability to achieve greater usability for travelers, to customize a matrix view of fares, to integrate mobile technologies and to incorporate more features from corporate travel booking systems and online travel agencies, according to Robinson.
"Customers have told us 'Why can't it be more like Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity,' " said Robinson. "So making that reservation process more intuitive and consumer-like is one of our objectives, that includes also the 'undo key' and to be able to change the reservation."
Unlike consumer booking sites, ETS contractors must provide not only travel planning and cost estimations, booking and fulfillment, but also travel authorization and approval workflows, travel expense claim processing, compliance with federal and agency travel policies and contracted preferred vendor rates, interface with other business systems and reporting.
After conducting market research last July, GSA found that travelers struggled to navigate the ETS online tool and that they rarely were able to purchase travel without training. Travelers within the National Science Foundation spent up to five hours in training to navigate through the tool, according to its branch chief of systems and services Neville Withington.
"People have an expectation that when they go to a Web site to purchase something they don't need training to make that transaction occur," said Robinson. "We expect it to be much more intuitive, much more transparent; some 60 percent of the government travelers travel less than three times a year. I don't care what program you're using, going online once every three or four months should be very intuitive."
With the implementation of ETS, GSA had hoped "that if the traveler was online, it would make their decision making or purchasing more predicable and easier to understand," Robinson said. That was "partially achieved but certainly not entirely," and there is "a lot that can be done to improve the intuitiveness and workflow."
"Usability has been an issue for all of us across government, and we are hoping that ETS2 will be easy to use," added Jerry Chenault, program manager, GovTrip U.S. Department of Agriculture. Overall, Chenault is "very satisfied, and it works end to end with our financial systems and that is extremely important. I can move away from some of the failures or shortcomings if I get what I need in the financial systems." However, "if you ask infrequent travelers, they would say that 'ETS is not any good at all.' Others are going to say, 'I really like it,' especially the frequent travelers."
GSA "also wants to have as much direct interaction with industry as possible, particularly the global distribution systems and the online booking [providers]," Robinson said. "Direct interaction is important so that there is an undiluted communication to what the government is trying to achieve with the online reservation process and in GDSs."
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice last month said it "determined that it is in its interest to issue a separate contract for services outside the GSA ETS" contracts as it issued its own request for information for e-Gov Travel Services. "In addition to cost effectiveness and efficiency, the ETS shall allow greater visibility into the DOJ travel process for continued management improvement," according to the seven-page RFI that set an April 28 response deadline. DOJ's eight major bureaus include 88,000 individual travel cardholders and 1,440 centrally billed travel accounts and generate about 350,000 trips a year. DOJ expects a travel management company to own and operate the technology required and said it expects all DOJ travelers to use only one TMC which will provide "two on-site offices in Washington, D.C." The RFI includes several questions on data security, privacy, encryption and audit capabilities, as well as conference planning and interfaces to "multiple legacy accounting systems and a new Unified Financial Management System to which all bureaus will migrate."
ETS: A Cautionary Tale For GSA Agencies
The government has high expectations for ETS2.
"We expect the vendors to keep pace with technology, with emerging security issues and the emerging requirements in terms of policy and regulation," said Robinson.
Going through the process of implementing ETS made National Science Foundation's Withington skeptical of being one of the first to go live with the new ETS2 platform. "I am never going to go first again. We were very early adopters of ETS, but there were some issues," said Withington. "We were very good at the change management process and I got the union, the travel arrangers and everyone else to give major feedback but I forgot one major constituent: the travelers themselves. I will not do that again."
Withington's "naïve idea [about ETS] was that this is the last manual process that we go through and it would be automated," she said. "We are getting toward the 10-year mark with the contract in the next few years, and my expectations have changed significantly in what I expect to see in the next generation. Currently, we are satisfied about 65 percent, but I expect to have 100 percent satisfaction on the next generation and if I don't get that I am going to be very unhappy."
Before implementation Withington plans to conduct extensive internal testing of the product rather than "trusting external sources" and "will not be quite the innovator" but will "let other people find the problems before I do."
USDA's Chenault is "looking forward to a [new] third" vendor as his department has moved onto its second vendor since the initial implementation of ETS. Chenault said the agency will judge and test vendors on "how 508-compliant they are," a law that requires agencies to purchase electronics and technology that are usable for those with disabilities.