Premium Travel Expenditure Reports

Background

Travel is an important and necessary component of government to accomplish agencies’ mission. In today’s climate of increased transparency, budget reductions, and accountability, agencies’ travel expenditures are closely evaluated to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. Government travelers are required to exercise the same care in incurring expenses that a prudent person would exercise if traveling on personal business . Therefore, when making official travel arrangements, agencies and employees must consider the most cost-effective class of transportation that meets their needs. Government travelers are required to use coach-class for official travel. Other than coach-class airline accommodations may be used only when their agency specifically authorizes/approves such transportation.

Travel in any class above coach class is also known as premium-class travel. To achieve the goals of greater accountability and transparency for the premium-class transportation, Chapter 300-70.100 of the Federal Travel Regulation (FTR) requires Federal agencies to annually submit premium-class travel data to the General Services Administration (GSA). Agencies are required to report their usage of other than coach class (first and business-class) transportation accommodation acquired while on official business which has a cost to the government greater than coach-class travel. The information is submitted annually via the GSA Travel Reporting Tool, a web-based reporting tool. The annual Premium-Class Travel Report presents the analysis of the data as a report from these annual submissions. This report provides an objective view of the data collected by GSA’s Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) as required by the FTR .