Public sector travel management

Public bodies mostly do not run their own travel tender. They call off a commercial agreement. That removes a procurement exercise and it does not remove the comparison — which is the part most often skipped, because a framework looks like it has done the work already.

The route to market

Crown Commercial Service's RM6016, Public Sector Travel and Venue Solutions, is the current commercial agreement. It replaced RM1034, Wider Public Sector Travel Management Services. It is available to central government, the wider public sector and other permitted users, and it covers travel management services, online booking for rail, accommodation and air, and venue finding and event services. Customers enter an enabling agreement with a supplier already on it rather than running a full procurement.

The customer guidance, the lot structure and the supplier list are published by CCS. Whether your organisation may or must use it, and what your own procurement rules require, is a question for your procurement and legal functions and not for this site.

What a framework decides, and what it does not

The practical consequenceA further competition within the agreement is where the eleven criteria get applied. The free tender template downgrades cleanly for that: delete section 9 where the commercials are already framed and sections 3 to 8 are exactly the capability questions a further competition should be asking.

Two things that are genuinely different

Transparency is an external obligation

In a private organisation, travel reporting exists because finance wants it. In a public one it may be published, requested or examined. That changes the reporting requirement from a preference into a specification, and it makes the questions about data formats and retention — and about what you get back at the end of the contract — worth considerably more than they are elsewhere.

The rail share changes what good looks like

Public sector programmes commonly carry a much higher proportion of domestic rail than comparable private sector ones. A booking tool that is excellent at air and adequate at rail is a worse fit here than its overall capability suggests, and it is a difference that a generic evaluation will not surface because it scores the tool rather than the journey mix.

Worth testing directly: ask for a demonstration of a rail booking with a change and a refund, not a flight. Rail is the harder of the two to do well — the ticketing rules are more fragmented, split-ticketing and advance-purchase restrictions behave differently from fare classes, and a refund on a walk-up ticket is not a refund on an advance one. A supplier whose demonstration reaches instinctively for an air itinerary is telling you where its strength is.

What a further competition should ask that a framework has not

If the commercial terms are already framed by the agreement, the questions that are left are the ones that decide whether the arrangement will work, and they are exactly the ones a light-touch further competition tends to skip. Five that are worth the space:

1. Which servicing office, by name, and what are its hours? A framework establishes that a supplier exists at national scale. It does not tell you which team will pick up your calls or in which timezone they sit.
2. What is the out-of-hours arrangement, and what is the number? In-house or subcontracted, charged per call or included, able to see your policy or not. Ring it during the process.
3. Demonstrate a tracking report against a test itinerary. Not a screenshot. The duty under the 1974 Act is yours whether you bought through a framework or not, and public bodies are more likely than most to have to show how they discharged it.
4. What data do we get back at the end, in what format, within how many days? A framework sets a term. It does not usually settle what happens to your booking history on the last day of it, and that history is what makes your next further competition a real comparison.
5. Where is our data processed, and under what terms? Worth asking explicitly rather than assuming the framework has settled it for your particular data.

None of those are commercial questions, which is why a framework does not answer them and why a further competition run purely on price leaves them unanswered too.

One thing worth checking before anything else

Whether there is an incumbent arrangement, and what it says. Framework call-offs have end dates and notice provisions in the same way any other contract does, and the pattern that catches private organisations out — planning forwards from today rather than backwards from a notice date — is not a private sector phenomenon. If a call-off is running, find its end date and its notice mechanism before scheduling anything else. It is a five-minute task that changes the whole timetable, or confirms it.

What stays the same

• The notice date. If there is an incumbent, it is still the only fixed point. Work backwards from it.
• The VAT question. A supply under the Tour Operators Margin Scheme gives a business customer no recoverable input VAT, whatever route you bought through.
• The exit terms. Framework or not, the data you get back on the last day is whatever was agreed on the first.

Common questions