GovernmentExecutive.com

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espite more than a decade of publicity, a multimillion-dollar contract with American Express and congressional encouragement, federal workers use the government travel card to pay for lodging on business trips only 52 percent of the time, according to a new General Services Administration survey.

"This is the first confirmation we've had that almost half of federal travel is paid for by means that don't directly benefit the government," says Bill Rivers, acting travel policy director at GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy.

The reasons people don't use the card are as varied as federal agencies. Agency for International Development travelers often go "to the backwoods of Third World countries, where credit cards are useless," says Bruce Gatti, chief of the agency's travel and transportation division. "In those places, cash is king." He's also heard that the AmEx card isn't widely accepted and that suspicious travelers don't want the government to know exactly what they're doing.

Others, like Marianne Graves, Office of Thrift Supervision travel program manager, suspect that the temptation of earning frequent flier miles, certificates and upgrades on a personal credit card may be too much for some travelers to resist.

Starting next spring, the Travel and Transportation Reform Act requires travelers to use the card, except in limited situations.

More widespread use of the card would:

• Help avoid the problems many travelers face in exempting their lodging bills from state and local taxes,
• Add at least $20 million to the federal coffers each year in rebates on transactions from the card vendor, and
• Give GSA better data on how and where feds travel, enabling more accurate setting of per diem rates, policy, and travel budget management, as well as better leverage in negotiating with travel industry partners, according to Becky Rhodes, deputy associate administrator at the Office of Governmentwide Policy.

"The average traveler doesn't think about the cost of the [travel] process," says Rivers. "I think they would be shocked to find out the financial benefit to the government [of using the card]."

GSA's survey also revealed that travelers are making their own arrangements more often than previously thought. Only 67 percent of flights, 33 percent of hotel and motel stays, and 45 percent of car rental reservations were booked through agencies' commercial travel offices or travel management centers, according to the survey.

"That brings into question our ability to say that we are in compliance with the Fire Safety Act," says Rivers. The act requires that federal employees stay in public accommodations that meet certain safety requirements. Agency travel offices take compliance into account when booking lodging, while most travelers probably don't.

Only if arrangements are made through travel offices can the government capture accurate information on where people are staying and how much they are spending. GSA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Army all are attempting to leverage the government's spending volume to get discounted lodging (as it does with the airline industry). Without the data, "we're unable to take advantage of what the government is spending," says Rivers.

Starting June 1, 2001, the Federal Travel Regulation requires all reservations be made through a travel management system or office.

Survey Data Shaky

The congressionally mandated GSA survey went to all federal agencies with annual travel budgets of $5 million or more (70 agencies in 1996). It will be conducted every two years and used in setting policy and budgets. Scheduled for release in October, this first survey faced some rough going. Data were inconsistent, both within some agencies and from agency to agency.

The effort has come under fire from some agencies for being incomplete and inconclusive. Some found the time agencies were given to put together their responses unreasonable. For example, Agriculture Department travel manager Lester Pitts says he had approximately three weeks to gather data from more than 120 contact points and consolidate it into one report on the department's 110,000 travelers. "After being forced to do it in that manner, we are leery of the credibility of the [governmentwide] data," says Pitts.

Pitts, Gatti and others also complain that the questions GSA posed were not in synch with the data available in their record-keeping systems. And some point out that in a rapidly evolving field like travel, 1996 data released in 1998 may be useless.

GSA is working with a group of agency representatives to shape the 1998 questions and process in an effort to get more reliable results. "It's going to be an evolutionary process," says Rivers. "I know the data was a pain for agencies to put together."