WASHINGTON -- In emergency bidding, a California travel agency was
selected to take over the $7.4 million account of Hill Air Force
Base in Utah after the incumbent, a Florida agency, abruptly
stopped serving the account.
N and N Travel, which does business under the name Galleria
Travel, of Redondo Beach, Calif., won the account, its seventh Air
Force base.
The previous agency, EXA Travel Center Gulf Coast of Pensacola,
Fla., won the account in 1995 and stopped serving it in June,
obliging the base's travelers to get tickets directly from
airlines.
Hill Air Force Base immediately asked six travel firms to submit
bids and selected Galleria Travel on July 29. On July 30, Galleria
officials flew to Utah to get operations up and running. They took
over the previous agency's CRS contract with System One, arranged
telephone lines and conducted employee interviews, according to
Galleria Travel president Tadako Newman. "We expect to be fully
operational on [Aug. 3]," she said.
The owner of EXA Travel did not return phone calls from Travel
Weekly. The Airlines Reporting Corp. said its accreditation "has
not been terminated."
EXA Travel was not the first choice of Hill Air Force Base in
1995. The base initially picked a Virginia consulting firm that
purported to be a travel agency but then went with EXA Travel, the
runner-up, after trade protests killed the first award.
Newman, whose agency did not bid in 1995, said the work stoppage
by EXA was "unfortunate. It makes the travel industry as a whole
look bad."
Agents in the government market have been in an acute financial
squeeze because they are contractually locked into rebates promised
before the commission cuts. Some agents have been able to
renegotiate their rebates, and many are trying to get the
government to switch to transaction fees.
Newman said Hill Air Force Base required a rebate in the new
bids. "We tried to fight it," she said, but base officials said it
was mandatory."
The account includes an estimated $6.2 million in official
travel and $1.2 million in leisure. Galleria Travel's contract is
for one year, with two six-month renewal options. The contract has
a short potential lifespan because military accounts are preparing
for the day when they are folded into larger, reengineered Defense
Department travel regions.
To that end, two more Air Force accounts shelved plans for
bidding and extended the incumbents' contracts. SatoTravel got a
sole-source extension at Keesler and Columbus Air Force Bases in
Mississippi; C.I. Travel of Norfolk, Va., got a sole-source
extension at Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral Air Station
in Florida.