A local travel agency that for years had been booking state employees’ travel has lost the contract to a Philadelphia-based Internet travel company, and is now claiming the bidding process was based on erroneous information. Donovan Travel, Inc. of East Greenwich is appealing the state’s decision to accept the bid from biztravel.com, an affiliate company of Philadelphia’s Rosenbluth International.
According to Gil Clappin, Jr., president and CEO of Donovan Travel, Inc., the award for Rhode Island state employees’ airline and automotive travel arrangements “was based on an erroneous culling of information from the request for proposal. Travel professionals didn’t read the bid and interpret it by industry standards.”
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Clappin said the state awarded Donovan the contract on July 6, but reversed its decision on July 18.
“They went purely down to dollars and made the decision that way, much to the state’s detriment,” Clappin said.
Clappin praised the Internet as a “tremendous purveyor of information,” and said that it plays a huge role in his business, both in helping clients and as a useful resource to his staff. However, Clappin said there are benefits to arranging travel through an actual agency:
“In the end, when there’s a problem, there’s someone you can always call. When USAir had their problems in March, our phones lit up with calls from Travel-ocity and Expedia customers,” he said. “They had no one to call.”
The state has arranged travel through Donovan – who won the contract in 1994, and two subsequent bids as well – for six years.
“We usually go out for those kinds of service bids every two years,” said director of administration Robert Carl.
According to Robert Poll, associate controller for the state of Rhode Island under the Department of Administration, the state did not pay surcharges for services.
“Donovan did not charge us a fee,” he said. “We were part of a rebate program.”
Poll explained that through that program, the state shared part of the agency’s commissions.
With the new service, Poll said, “as long as we go electronic [via the Internet], there will be no fee to the state of Rhode Island.”
The state, according to Carl, spends an average of $1.7 million in travel each year – 40 percent of which is airfare, the rest allotted to food and registration fees for conferences – and the evaluation process to decide which company gets the bid will be ongoing.
“We have to ask ‘How can we get the best service for the least costs?'” he said. “He [Poll] looked at the data and recommended this as the way to go, and we’ll keep doing that.”
The $1.7 million figure does not reflect all travel expenses incurred by state agencies, according to Poll.
“The University goes through the state to some extent,” Poll said. “Rhode Island College and CCRI participate in the state contract, but their numbers are not included in the $1.7 million figure.”
Poll approximated that the three state institutions spent $1.5 million collectively on travel in 1998, but stressed that that figure reflects all funding sources, not just the amount paid by the state.
