Mark Pestronk
Q: My agency would like to break into the federal government travel-management arena. Specifically, we would like to explore opportunities for providing government agencies with the same kind of corporate travel-management services that we have provided to corporate and institutional accounts for many years. One expert in this field told me to forget about it, as the government market is closed to smaller entrants like us. Is this true, and how did it happen?
A: Three decades ago, several dozen smaller travel agencies held federal government travel-management contracts, and new entrants stood a good chance of getting a contract. Through a series of bad decisions by government personnel since the turn of the century, this market no longer exists.
For small- and midsized agencies, the heyday of government travel started about 1982, under a then-new program headed by General Services Administration (GSA) executive Ivan Michael Schaeffer. His laudable idea was that federal civilian government agencies would benefit by receiving the same services that travel agencies were providing to corporations. Schaeffer and two subordinates at the GSA ran the entire program by issuing the RFP, evaluating the proposals, deciding which agency should win and supervising their performance. In those days, each travel agency was awarded the travel for all the civilian federal agencies in its metro area or state for up to five years.
Most of these travel agencies qualified as small, woman- or minority-owned businesses. Some held on to the business for decades.
A few years later, two Defense Department components, the Marine Corps and the Air Force, copied the GSA's program, awarding one base at a time to travel agencies that would handle their official travel on airlines, hotels and car rentals.
The GSA and Defense systems worked well, and there were plenty of opportunities for travel agencies of all sizes to respond to RFPs. It usually helped to have some government-travel experience, but corporate-account experience was considered, as well.
Then, early in the 2000s, a new generation of procurement specialists took over the GSA program, and in the interest of streamlining government complicated it. Under the GSA Advantage program, a travel agency could win a government contract, but such an award didn't entitle it to any business.
The GSA simply placed the awardee's contact information on the schedule of travel service providers, which can be found under the "travel and transportation solutions" category at www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov (to view the list, click "travel services solutions" and then select "travel agent services," which is category 599-2). This listing allowed government agencies to solicit any travel agencies they wished, and vice-versa.
At its height about a decade ago, the schedule had over 50 travel agencies. Today, only 24 remain, and several of these do not appear to be in the travel business at all. What happened was that if you did not land any business within a few years after you got the contract, the GSA dropped you from the list. The majority that remain have only a small piece of the government travel volume.
Where did all the business go? Starting about a decade ago, the government largely stopped contracting with travel agencies. In the interest of further streamlining and alleged cost saving, the government adopted a new program that I will discuss in my next column.