UPDATED: Dec. 3, 2015 at 12:46 p.m.

About 40 percent of the faculty at Syracuse University have signed a petition opposing the new travel and entertainment policy requiring them to use a designated online booking service when it comes to work-related travel.

The policy named BTI The Travel Consultants as the official travel management company for the university. Faculty and staff must also use Concur, a 24/7 online booking portal, when they book their “university-funded, sponsored research or grant-funded travel,” according to an SU News release.

In addition, faculty, staff and students using Concur have access to a “live” travel agent in the event of travel interruption (and) be provided receipts electronically for free, said Douglas Freeman, director of purchasing and real estate and initiative team manager, in an email.

“Unused tickets are managed in the traveler’s profile and monitored by the travel agency to ensure they get reissued and do not expire,” Freeman added.

The new policy went into effect Sept. 1.

A task was given to the Fast Forward Syracuse Operational Excellence initiative teams to re-think how the university buys goods and services to fully leverage the university’s purchasing power as “One University,” and travel and entertainment was identified as one of the most promising areas to achieve savings, Freeman said.

The university believes that through this new policy, it will save $2 million annually, according to the release. This will be done because by exclusively using Concur, the university will be able to better manage its travel spending.

The 357 faculty and staff members who signed the petition are skeptical of this statement.

“Faculty research accounts are finite amounts, and so individual faculty already had every incentive to use their research funds responsibly under the old system,” said Michael Goode, an English professor and organizer of the petition.

The general view by the faculty involved with the petition is that almost all of the projected savings will come from savings on group bookings, such as athletics department team travel and bookings for administrative work-related travel, and not necessarily from faculty traveling for research purposes, he said.

Most of the faculty and staff do not reject the policy in its entirety, but Goode said they are particularly upset that the new policy forces them to book all individual, work-related travel through BTI and the Concur travel portal “whether or not it makes sound financial sense for us to do so.”

“The Concur travel portal does not always come up with the best rates for airfare and hotels, and there is a $10 per use booking fee to use it,” Goode said.

This fee is currently being paid by the university, but it will eventually be passed along to the faculty in the future, he added.

In addition, faculty and staff take issue with the inefficiency of the program.

“A revised travel policy will offer concise, one-stop travel assistance that allows the University to achieve greater negotiated rates with preferred vendors,” said Freeman, the director of purchasing and real estate and initiative team manager, in the SU News release.

However, Goode said many faculty members have complained that not only does the new booking system take longer to use, but the university also requires “new, time-consuming paperwork from them when they plan travel and submit receipts.”

The use of Concur also makes it difficult to combine work travel and family travel, as it is only allowed to be used by the university employee, Goode said.

As some conferences occur over holidays or periods where the university is not in session, some faculty combine their research-related travel and family travel, but will now have a more difficult time coordinating the two, he said.

The university is currently working to improve the policy in light of the petition.

“In an effort to resolve some campus concerns about policy restrictions, the Fast Forward Syracuse Travel Policy initiative team has been reconvened, increased its number of faculty members and will continue to develop service enhancements and further policy clarifications,” Freeman said.

In addition, the team has developed a survey to be conducted this month “to encourage additional campus feedback on the travel policy, travel process, BTI and the Concur online travel portal,” he added.

Goode said he still believes the policy is a “mistake.”

“(With the above complaints), the attempt to create a one-size-fits-all policy to cover the entire university — and especially the entire range of faculty and their diverse research travel needs — has thus failed miserably,” Goode said.

Correction: In a pervious version of this article, the level of employees who signed the petition was misstated. The petition states it represents faculty members, not faculty and staff members. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on December 2, 2015 at 10:23 pm

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