In the 14 years Tim Hay worked for the state of Oregon, he
slowly built an integrated travel consortium program across more than two
dozen states in cooperation with the Western States Contracting
Alliance-National Association of State Procurement Officials.
Now cooperative development coordinator for WSCA-NASPO, Hay
said the process began with a multistate agreement for car rentals.
"The way I built the program, I knew we had to start with the core contract and something
that would be easy to implement, and I knew that the car rental piece was the
right piece to start with," he said. "We knew that would be something
that was tangible, that the states have a need for, and it would be easy to
measure success."
The car rental program paved the way for a national hotel
program, which now boasts 13,000 participating properties.
Hay helped build a searchable database, which eventually lead to solicitation for an online
booking tool (eventually selecting Sabre's GetThere) and the decision to create
an airline program.
The history of the hotel and car rental agreements was
helpful when it came to setting up airline contracts, he said.
"We were going to go with a traditional RFP approach,
and that didn't work, so we actually had to work with the industry to build
that program, and I think it was because of the collaboration we had with the
hotel industry that helped give us some leverage, or some talking power, with
the airlines."
He negotiated a deal with Southwest Airlines to put together
the first-ever multistate airline agreement. "If you know the airline
industry at all," he said, "they don't like consortiums. So I felt
like this was a huge, huge milestone."
He said other airlines are showing curiosity. "This is
our opportunity to prove that a multistate airline consortium can work,"
Hay said.
Only a handful of states, he added, have a managed travel
program, a fact he referred to as "crazy."
"The states represent about a $4 billion annual spend
for government travel. I built a managed travel program in a box so states can
pick and choose what modules they like."
Users have the option of applying the full suite of
programs, which includes a car rental piece, a hotel option, and services with
Southwest, or cherry-picking the elements that best serve their needs.
"I'm hoping we'll get more states to use [the program],"
Hay said. "This is really fresh. It's only been in place since March, so
we're still in the growing phase."
Since the program went live, several states, including
Maine, Montana and Vermont, have signed up.
"Montana has never had a managed travel program, and
this was the first arena into managed travel," said Hay. "They're
going to start seeing that data for the first time, and I think a light bulb's
going to come on where they say, 'Wow, we're spending this much on travel?'
"They're going to have that first vision of what they've
been spending all these years, and then they can build upon that," Hay
continued. "And then we're going to be able to take that data and
hopefully aggregate it, and take those top markets and hopefully leverage it to
even further savings."
This report
originally appeared in the Sept. 2, 2013, edition of Business Travel News.