By SHANNON O. WELLS
After an intensive process involving a range of Pitt stakeholders, a newly signed contract will continue the University’s well-established relationship with Anthony Travel.
At its Jan. 15 meeting at Posvar Hall, Faculty Assembly learned some of the ins and outs that led to a new travel management contract last fall. Maureen Beal, associate vice chancellor in Pitt’s chief financial officer’s office, and Emily Duchene, University travel manager in the Purchase, Pay and Travel Department, presented an update on the Travel Advisory Team’s work in the past year that led to Pitt extending its contract with Anthony.
The new, five-year, University-wide contract agreement goes into effect on Feb. 1.
The process, which began in January 2024, normally includes University stakeholders in all University-wide supplier requests for proposals (RFPs). However, Beal said, because “travel is so personal, and because of the issues experienced during the rapid, post-COVID return to travel, we made sure that this RFP process was very much driven by University travelers.”
Although the internal Purchasing and Travel Management Team provided data and handled the RFP’s mechanics, she explained, the award decision came through an evaluation and scoring team comprising faculty and staff from eight units across Pitt who are frequent purchasers of travel services.
“Many of these folks are also on our standing Travel Advisory Group … that provides us with ongoing guidance on how we can improve travel support,” Beal said. “This RFP project was a tremendous commitment of time, so I would like to thank each and every one of the faculty and staff that you see listed here for their efforts. I think their work will benefit the entire University community.”
University service requirements for travel included in the RFP were based on broad traveler surveys as well as in-person interviews with high-frequency travelers. The RFP was publicly posted and sent directly to 30 travel management companies.
“We received 11 proposals, and then the team whittled those down to five finalists that also made presentations to the evaluation team,” Beal said, noting that proposals were scored based on service offerings and business model. “For us, that primarily meant their ability to provide dedicated agents to the University, support for the Plan for Pitt goals of increasing local and diverse businesses and sustainability — and of course, price.”
Beal reminded Pitt travelers that they have the option to book trips themselves via the Concur app or through assistance from an Anthony Travel agent.
“However, we do want to point out that those who book outside of the program … may be missing out on travel discounts, travel planning assistance, emergency assistance, free ticket transfers, visa and passport services and assistance in meeting the University’s duty-of-care requirements for faculty, staff and students who are traveling in connection with University business or programs,” she said. “I think most people are already very familiar with Anthony Travel as the incumbent, but I did want to make a few points about them.”
Pandemic problems
In the travel management industry, in which businesses come and go at a high rate, she noted, Anthony Travel has been a stable business for more than 30 years, with 111 higher education clients. The evaluation team also considered Anthony Travel’s efforts to improve service in the last two years after the rapid post-COVID return to travel.
“If we hark back to the pandemic, Anthony Travel, like all other travel agencies, was forced to lay off its staff simply to survive as a business,” Beal said, adding that when travel resumed in the spring of 2022, Anthony Travel had to quickly re-staff to handle a rapidly rising volume of travel. “I don’t know if you remember this, but we went from zero to 90 miles an hour in about three months.
“Also at that time, we had high numbers of airline and hotel cancelations due to their own staffing issues and a lack of rental cars, since the rental car companies had sold off their fleets during the pandemic to survive,” she added. “So although Anthony Travel could not fix those problems, they did add two agents that worked round the clock, and that brought the total number of agents dedicated to our account to four.”
They’ve maintained that level of support since, Beal noted. A survey of about 5,700 Pitt travelers who booked through Anthony for a 12-month period ending in September 2024 showed that 88% of them were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with Anthony Travel service.
A slide showing the benefits of Pitt’s current contract with Anthony Travel highlighted the company’s expertise in the “unique needs of global, educational and group travel” that universities have. These include Global Studies uses and study abroad programs, and four dedicated campus agents who Beal said “really understand the University,” as opposed to some other companies that have a large pool of agents with many customers.
Connected and customized
Anthony Travel is also Concur cloud application capable, which means that calls to Concur are integrated with the University’s Concur Travel Management System. This streamlines expense reporting by passing booking information to the expense report while also feeding Pitt’s International SOS emergency alert system, she said.
When booking with Anthony Travel agents or self-booking, clients can access travel discounts for airlines, hotels and car rentals negotiated between Pitt and Anthony Travel.
“After listening to travel feedback, we requested that Anthony travel provide the University community with even better service by insourcing their after-hours support. So they will be doing that,” Beal said. “We are requiring formal, orderly service evaluations, and we will share those evaluations and work with our travel advisory group on stepping through those evaluations.”
Anthony Travel has been asked to provide custom training sessions for departments with unique needs, and in support of the Plan for Pitt goals, the University requires Anthony to research the availability of diverse bus transportation and lodging partners when assisting Pitt travelers with their plans.
“And we’ve also connected them with a Pittsburgh anchor institution, a collaborative called BEAM, which is focused on strengthening local minority businesses,” she said. “We feel that being and working with BEAM will help Anthony Travel in terms of planning that inbound travel business, where we have visitors to the University.”
New and improved services
Responding to questions about using discounts based on accrued points for personal trips, Duchene said the discounts are not available to those looking outside of the program to a third party not affiliated with the school.
“You would have to book either through the Concur online booking tool or with the Anthony Travel agents to be able to obtain the discounts whenever you are booking for personal trips,” she said.
“I know that there have been questions in the past and concerns that if you book through Concur, that you don’t earn your Marriott Rewards points, and that’s not accurate,” Duchene said. “You do earn those rewards points whenever you’re booking through Concur. It’s only whenever you’re booking through a tool like Expedia that Marriott doesn’t honor those for you to earn your rewards.”
Responding to a follow-up question about students, she said students are “absolutely able to book for study abroad through the program. We actually work closely with Hillary Koller and her team in Study Abroad/Pitt GEO, to make sure that anything that is University paid that they’re going on … all get booked through Anthony Travel.”
Juan Taboas, associate professor in the School of Dental Medicine, asked if improvements have been negotiated regarding Anthony’s web interface and “being able to see options for flights in a matrix manner, as opposed to this list that Anthony does.”
“Sometimes it tells you on their website that you can’t select seats, and you’re gonna have to do that with the airline direct,” he said. “Were those kinds of things also included in this contract?”
Duchene explained that those are Concur software restraints and a new user interface is coming out, likely by the “first of the fiscal year.
“I’ve been testing it, and it is a much nicer user experience, more in line with what you would see from the airlines directly,” she said. “So I think that people are going to be pleased whenever they get that new interface, but that’s a Concur constraint not Anthony Travel.”
Duchene clarified that training is not likely required. “Honestly, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary, because it is so user friendly compared to what we currently have. And I understand the angst that everyone has experienced with that old user interface.
“Maureen (Beal) knows that we’ve been pushing them for a long time,” she said. “There were some things that held us back because of corporate environments, because of the nature of what we do with the students and everything, that we wanted … all the kinks fixed before we gave it to you guys.”
Satisfying range of needs
Beal said while they were pleased with the 88% satisfaction score, they also dug “very deeply into those issues (raised by the 12%) and made sure that they were included in the RFP and then built into the contract,” she said.
Duchene explained that one of the recurrent complaints involved after-hours service.
“We really worked with them to bring that in-house, instead of it being third party, that would be supporting that,” she said. “Because then they’re much more familiar with what our policies and procedures are and the level of service that we expect. But that was the biggest thing.
“Anthony Travel sends out surveys after every booking,” she added, “but we’re going to do our own quarterly surveys and match them up to each other to see if they tell Anthony one thing and we’re getting a different message, so that we can make sure that they’re meeting the level that the University expects of them.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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