TMC Deploys Policy, Tech For Campaign

In the past year, MacNair Travel Management, a privately owned American Express affiliate managing travel for the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign, has secured deals with preferred carriers, deployed online booking technology, and trained a temporary staff to take reservations for campaign volunteers. Weeks before voters descend on the polls, the firm within a 10-day timeframe arranged travel for more than 7,000 volunteers, representing more than $2 million in airfares.

"The Republican National Committee came to us and said, 'we have 7,000 volunteers who we need to get out to the polls in support of Election Day. Can you help us?' " said MacNair Travel Management president and CEO Michael MacNair. "You can imagine having to ramp up staff to issue 7,000 tickets in a window of 10 days."

MacNair tapped the resources of campaign volunteers to help, training 40 to use a modified GetThere booking tool and begin processing reservations. "The volunteers came to us on a Thursday, and by Monday night we had reservations going," MacNair said.

"We provided a series of training seminars for the volunteers, signed them up, gave them access and totally reinvented the quality control support side," MacNair continued. "Whenever these reservations were dumped into queue, we were issuing them immediately. We had people who took turns looking at queues and clearing them out and making sure all those tickets were issued and supported."

Each volunteer was assigned a list of names and phone numbers of campaign workers who needed reservations and booked trips accordingly. MacNair's policy was to book the lowest available fare, yet any fare over a predetermined threshold would be bounced from the volunteers to MacNair's staff.

MacNair said he made the most of Bush/Cheney campaign dollars. The agency secured air contracts from preferred vendor United Airlines, among others, and booked an average ticket price of $313.42 for the campaign, compared with the national average of $462, according to Topaz International figures.

Yet, getting those deals in place was not easy, MacNair said. While most corporate travel managers use volume numbers from the prior year when negotiating airline contracts, MacNair had to rely solely on projections. "The airlines said, 'well, what was your volume last year.' It didn't exist last year," he said. "I had to show them a track record of what I know and use that to negotiate. Clearly, there were some suppliers who were unwilling to even talk. We put out a request for proposals and there were some major carriers who didn't respond. The ones that did are very, very happy."

MacNair said working with the campaign has stress-tested the agency's systems and staff. "Once the campaign is over, I'll have the most-tested travel management team available for the next big project, so bring 'em on," he said.

The Kerry/Edwards campaign employs Boston-based Garber Travel. The TMC did not receive permission to discuss the campaign's travel with BTN.