US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - Advice for dealing with School Travel Bureaucracy

My student organization has a trip planned for Jan 31st-Feb.3rd in Washington, DC. We had been budgeted $100 per ticket for each student in order to fly from Boston into BWI even though our convention is in DCA just because BWI had a cheaper fare. We were also allocated around $40 per person for ground trans. from BWI to our hotel (which is right next to DCA).

Now the fare has increased to $130 ($110 plus $20 service charge per ticket from my school's travel agency). Looking at Orbitz.com, they have a fare of $154 from Boston into DCA. I called the travel agency and they said the lowest fare they have is $200 plus $20 service fee for a total of $220 per ticket.

My question is why can't the travel agency book the $154 fare for us? I am bound by the school to book through this agency even though they are blatantly overcharging me on both the fare and the ridiculous $20 per ticket service fee.

Basically, if I book through the travel agency, right now we would only have funding for BWI + ground trans. Not the $220 DCA fare that they want.

I'm tempted to book the DCA flights on Orbitz with my own CC, bring my receipt to Accounts Payable and see if they let it slide.

It seems utterly ridiculous for me to pay the same money to fly into BWI when for the same money I can fly into DCA which is 5 minutes away from the hotel.

-Jon

[This message has been edited by Ringfan (edited 12-30-2001).]

If you're required to book through that travel agent by contract, you don't have any choice. But if it's a "policy" or "strong recommendation" or something like that, you should be able to go around them. Where I work, we have a corporate travel agent (also idiots like your school's), but it is OK for us to use others, such as Expedia.com.

How many students do you have? The $154 fare on Orbitz may not be available for everyone in the group on the same flight. The $200 per person might be correct if it's a large group.

Amtrak is $156 roundtrip on the unreserved trains; more for Acela Express.

This is the typical crock of crap that really bugs me with the in house travel agencies these days. You make any type of change or reservation and you get nailed with a $20 fee. On a trip a couple months back, two co-workers and I were down in CLT visiting a client. We decided to push the return back later than we had scheduled. Since I booked via usairways.com, I called and simply rescheduled the return (took about 2 minutes on the phone). My two co-workers booked via the in-house agent (Amex) and called to change the res. Low and behold, two weeks later, the firm got charged $40 for making the two changes....

BOS-BWI is coming up at $98+tax now that Airtran is in on that route. I show it being available on the dates you want, but not knowing the specifics of times and # of people, I can't confirm that it'll work for you.

As for why that $154 fare won't work, the answer is in the fare rules (http://reservations.usairways.com/airgrules.ctl?dep_arp_code=BOS&arr_arp_code=WAS&fare_bss_cd=VS9E14WN&aln_code=US&dep_dt=20011230)...
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">APPLIES FROM 12:00 N. MON THRU 12:00 N. THU. APPLIES 12:00 N. - 11:59 P.M. SAT
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Also, have you looked at US Airways Group Travel (http://www.usairways.com/groups/)? They may be able to help you the best. Good luck!