Bid protest slows Pentagon’s electronic travel program
A revised solicitation, to be released in August, could include fixed prices due to GAO ruling.
The Government Accountability Office has sustained a bid protest against the Pentagon's plan to consolidate its travel contracts under the Defense Travel System.
In a decision that has yet to be publicly released, Jonathan L. Kang, a senior attorney in GAO's Procurement Law Group, said in a July 25 e-mail that the agency would uphold a protest to the request for proposals for Defense Department travel services because the solicitation's pricing is based on hypothetical data.
The protest was filed by two firms, CI Travel in Norfolk, Va., and CW Government Travel in San Antonio, Texas, and could require fixed pricing for DTS contracts.
Kang wrote in the e-mail, obtained by Government Executive, that the current plan's failure to require potential contractors to submit fees that would be binding kept the department from properly evaluating the cost.
Another protest challenging the solicitation's guaranteed minimum requirement was denied.
DTS involves an end-to-end travel booking service and accounting and voucher validation process for all Defense Department travel agency business worldwide.
Peggy Butler, senior contracting officer for DTS acquisitions' division, the Information Technology E-Commerce Commercial Contract Center, said the request for proposals will be amended and released next month.
The protested solicitation, announced in November, would have awarded multiple indefinite-delivery and indefinite-quantity contracts to companies able to perform 180,000 ticket transactions annually, among other requirements.
The reason the first solicitation used hypothetical data for airline tickets, hotels and rental cars based on real-life situations, Butler said, was to get an idea of who could compete for individual travel areas. Once a travel agency received a contract under the solicitation, the company would submit proposals for individual Defense travel areas using the real-life data for pricing purposes.
Butler said that the companies protesting the contract are hoping to preserve their existing Defense travel service contracts and "the longer they can keep those current contracts, the more business for them."
"It's all a game to slow the government down, to slow this program down to keep their current business," Butler said.
She said current Defense Department contracts for travel services will be extended while the new request for proposals is revised.
Kevin McElroy, president of CI Travel, said his company objected to the solicitation because the pricing would not be binding on travel agencies and proposals could be either made excessively low or extremely high, allowing manipulation of the bidding process.
He denied Butler's claim that the bid protests were filed to slow down the process of moving to a new contract.
"If you look at us and others in our group, none of us have a significant number of [Pentagon] accounts that would make sense for us to slow the process down," McElroy said. "We have a couple of [Defense] contracts, so our opportunities are much greater with more procurements coming out rather than just sticking with what we have."
Other travel agencies filing under the CI Travel protest included Knowledge Connections in Reston, Va.; Alamo Travel in San Antonio, Texas; National Travel in Charleston, W.Va.; and Bay Area Travel in Houston, Texas. CW Government Travel filed a separate protest and could not be reached for comment.