Stop rinsing our research budgets, university travel agents told

Exactly- I refuse to use them as they overcharge, underdeliver and waste my time. Rinsing is correct, unless you only travel once a year perhaps. Good academics probably travel twice a month. Also the same with IT procurement in my university. They took a year to deliver a laptop at twice the price to the department. It goes on. My RG university suggests that I don't need an office to work in, or should share or hot desk, storing my books and files, research archive at my own expense. Britain's universities better sharpen up quick, pull back from their bizarre tinpot trajectory, and start treating academics like the globally competative professionals they are because the best are heading for the door at the moment. Many have gone over the last 5 years. Too much anti-science/ scholarship, provincial thinking in the UK HE sector. I'm on the brink of going abroad myself.

When I first moved to the UK (from Australia), I asked for a university credit card (both my AU and US universities issued these to everyone with a 'budget' -- every month you linked each expense to a budget and receipts and if you did not they just took the charges from your after tax salary). I was called in by the CFO and told in no uncertain terms that I was not competent enough to have a university 'purchase card' (part of the culture where university administrators believe (a) academics are not competent and (b) if left to their own devices academics would loot the university finances (which they would obviously not due in a competent manner since (a) implies they can't do anything useful). Instead, I had to use the antiquated system on offer that provided no convenience and no actual savings. In fact the system is meant to extract money from your budget. Two points on this. One is that the 'preferred travel agent' (which in the case of almost all UK universities is actually one travel agency since they all seem to use the same one -- which is little more than a front end for discount booking systems) gives the university a kickback (oops discount) on the volume of activity. However, the university does not give the user this money back. So if I spend £1,000 on a trip, the university is effectively getting a refund of some percentage (which for the university as a whole can be quite substantial). So using the travel agent allows them to tax your budget. Second, if the travel agent does not provide cheaper alternative that exist (e.g., I was forced to pay almost double for a flight inside the US when I could have gotten it cheaper if I paid myself using my US credit card) all that happens is that your budget gets charged. So the university gives me a budget but then taxes that budget and forces me to spend the budget inefficiently. I ultimately lose since money I could have used for something else is now wasted -- but they don't care since I would have spent my budget anyway.

They also get kickbacks from hotel chains which skews their hotel selections. One booking company tried very hard to put me as a single woman traveller into a chain hotel near a railway station miles from the university I was visiting. This area was famous for, shall we say, local night time commercial inter-gender transactional relations and I was expected to walk through it. The risk to my welfare was considerable. I had to kick up a massive fuss to be accommodated in a safer area in a suitable hotel - which was also much cheaper! I think we should all have a university credit card for travel with the caveat that you will have to personally repay unauthorised overspends. I used to have one in a previous academic job and it worked brilliantly.

PS I got off lightly compared to my colleagues housed in a one-star hotel in India where they all immediately got dystentery and were sharing bathrooms, eventually missing what they had travelled there for. There isn’t a box for this on university risk assessment forms, is there?

I have spent a *whole* week trying to book some straightforward flights through our University’s travel management system - flights that would have taken me 5 minutes to book directly with the airline itself. After days of to-ing and fro-ing they quoted me £4,700 for flights that cost £1600 to book direct. It’s incredibly stressful and time consuming, not to mention a colossal waste of our already scarce budgets.

I have spent countless hours attempting to book what should be a simple trip to the US for my lab to attend a conference. I am forced to use a terribly slow and clunky web portal that offers very limited options for accommodation. I had to collect all personal data from all members and then fight with the travel agent who apparently just re-inputs the data (incorrectly) to book hotels. I'm a university professor with precious time to waste on burdensome redtape and I am horribly irritated by the astounding level of incompetence I have to deal with. If I can't get my job done in this environment I will vote with my feet, there's plenty of universities around the world where I could just walk in and get a job with proper admin support.