UK Buyers To Issue Standard Agency RFP
<FONT SIZE="+3"><B>UK Buyers To Issue Standard Agency RFP</B>
By Amon Cohen
Britain's Guild of Business Travel Agents is drawing up a standard agency request for proposal framework to help simplify an increasingly complex and controversial subject.
Some agents have complained that requests for proposals (known as tenders in the United Kingdom) are becoming unnecessarily elaborate, requiring considerable extra effort from the tendering agency, often for no reward. The GBTA hopes that by establishing a standard format, it will eliminate unnecessary work for agent and client alike by building a recognizable structure for providing relevant information.
The team preparing the proposal expects to produce a finished copy by mid-November and will present it for comment to the Business Travel Liaison Group, the Institute of Travel Management, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply.
"We have identified that tenders are increasingly coming in all shapes and sizes, but there should be 11 key elements in every proposal,'' says P&O Travel sales and marketing director Keith Haynes, a member of the three-person team (see box). "Some clients have started asking for reams and reams of information, and we feel some of them have lost their way. I bet that any company that goes out to tender could fit its requirements into those 11 categories.''
Haynes apportions some of the blame for this elaboration on travel mangement consultants. Still a new phenomenon in the United Kingdom, consultants usually are former travel agents or buyers who advise corporate clients on how to reduce their spend. As part of this job, they often are involved in constructing agency RFPs for the client.
He suspects certain consultants of deliberately overcomplicating RFPs to increase their fees. "They are paid on a daily time basis, so the longer they spin it out, the more money they can earn,'' he said.
Ironically, in spite of the Guild's concern about the growing power of consultants, it is considering appointing one to advise corporates on the services offered by all 39 of its members. The consultant would be expected to keep fully abreast of technological and other developments at each agency.
As an example of where he believes RFPs are going wrong, Haynes cites one for which P&O Travel competed earlier this year. The request demanded so much information that, Haynes says, "they virtually wanted me to guarantee what color underpants I would be wearing on each day of the week.''
In the end, P&O Travel submitted a 59-page response, for which it had to make 12 copies and send them to the United States at a cost of 200. The client, Haynes noted, employed no fewer than three consultants on the exercise.
The Guild's concerns about RFPs and consultants drew a mixed response from other travel industry professionals. One person fully in favor of the proposed standard document is Andrew Fletcher, company secretary of the military aircraft division of British Aerospace and chairman of the Business Travel Liaison Group, an association of top U.K. travel purchasers.
"It is a fine idea and I give my full support to any generic document," he said. "There is a mutual interest in condensing the process and deciding what are the driving factors."
However, Fletcher is less concerned about the RFPs sent out by clients than he is about the inordinately lengthy responses submitted by agents. "We have told agents often enough that it is a problem of sorting the wheat from the chaff," he said. "It is all very well having a large, glossy document saying what you can do, but the essence of any tender ought to be consolidated to two or three sheets of paper. Clients don't ask for large proposals; they haven't got the time to digest them."
Fletcher suggests that before an RFP is sent out, client and bidders should agree upon what information they require from each other. He also wants to see an end to off-the-peg responses from agents. "A lot of the documents I see look as if the agent pressed buttons number 13 and 15 on their computers and adjusted the figures on the printout to the size of the client's travel spend," he said.
Germany-based Elaine White, president of The Global Group travel consultancy, says a generic framework is an excellent idea. "If we could do 80 percent of a tender in standard form, that would save time for everybody,'' she said.
Other travel managers are less convinced of the merits of a generic RFP framework. "It has got to be more flexible. You cannot do a tender by numbers,'' said Andrew Cornwall, purchasing and travel officer for Standard Chartered bank. "Standard Chartered's travel is almost exclusively long-haul and would not fit easily into a standard document.'' The bank did, however, avoid a lengthy tender when it recently bid for an agency.
Also skeptical about generic RFPs is Glyn Farrell, personnel travel and facilities manager for Lloyds Bank. "It might be useful for smaller companies but not for bigger companies with more flexible requirements,'' he said.
Even White, who supports the overall concept, disagrees that RFPs have become too complicated. "Tenders have become longer because clients and agents previously did not have the systems to collect the data that was needed,'' she said. "Companies like Business Travel International and American Express do know how to collect it, but the smaller agents do not, and they are the ones who are screaming.'' The data that clients now request from their agencies is the only way of quantifying the cost of purchasing, White maintained.