MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. -- The Defense Department will order its employees to use the half-billion-dollar Defense Travel System to book their trips in the future. Until now, employees have widely shunned the system, saying it is hard to use and prone to glitches. 

But Pentagon defenders of the system say they have fixed the problems and will insist employees use it now to book all temporary duty travel beginning "early this fall," a department spokesman said. 

The department's decision is based on the recommendations of a new Pentagon-commissioned report that endorses expanding the system's use at the department.
The report, done by the non-profit Institute for Defense Analyses, recommends the department keep using the system to book trips and to manage travel accounting and expense reimbursements. 

The report represents a big win for DTS proponents -- including David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. Chu and other defenders have argued for fixing, not replacing, the system. Congressional critics, however, had been pressing the department to mothball the travel-booking features of the system, and to use it only for accounting purposes. 

The institute completed the report in March, but the Defense Department did not publicly release it until last week, in response to a Federal Times request. The report was sent to Congress on July 10. 

Often billed as a Pentagon version of Expedia or Travelocity, DTS allows users to validate travel orders, book tickets and submit travel records for near-immediate reimbursement, all in one online system. But congressional audits showed the system had trouble finding the least-expensive route between cities and accessing complete flight schedules. Users complained the system was hard to navigate. 

The IDA report says a new reservation system called Reservation Refresh launched in February fixes the problems. The new system provides lowest-cost routes, accesses a more complete flight inventory, and improves usability by allowing users to sort travel options in a variety of ways, such as by departure time or cost, the report said. 

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last year found that 83 percent of the trips reviewed that were taken by Defense employees in 2006 were booked through commercial arrangements and not DTS. The panel examined more than 755,000 trips taken at 42 Defense facilities. The system is supposed to support 3.4 million users. 

Fueled by the investigation and scathing reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's inspector general, congressional critics of DTS have called for a downsizing and even termination of the program. 

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., with support from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., earlier this year introduced a bill requiring Defense to scrap the travel-booking portion of the system, which the senators labeled a "boondoggle." 

But the report gives the program another chance to redeem itself. 

Coleman said in a statement he would withhold further action on his bill "to afford the Secretary of Defense an opportunity to implement the report's recommendations."
A Pentagon spokesman said the department "will implement all feasible and cost-effective recommendations," from the study. That includes making DTS mandatory for all temporary duty travel that DTS supports by "early this fall," said Maj. Stewart Upton, the spokesman. 

Currently, Defense organizations vary in whether they mandate use of the system. The department will continue to make incremental improvements to grow usage of the system over the long term, he said. 

The IDA study assessed the cost and benefits of separating the financial and travel-booking portions of DTS, of mandating use of the financial part of the system for all travel transactions and of converting the travel reservation process to a fee-for-services system, instead of the current "cost-plus" arrangement. 

The report recommends against splitting the two portions of DTS and says "it is not feasible to" mandate use of the financial portion of the system now. That's because some Defense offices perform functions such as processing travel vouchers using older systems that cannot immediately be scrapped. However, the report called for the department to eventually end its use of those legacy systems, which was something else that Coleman's legislation would have required.