Stop rinsing our research budgets, university travel agents told

The rise of the “preferred university travel supplier” was meant to take the stress out of booking tickets for conferences and field trips. But some academics have begun to question the supposed cost and convenience benefits of these one-stop travel shops by citing nightmare journeys arranged by booking firms whose fares vastly exceed those available online.

Slow booking times mean cheaper in-advance deals are often sold out, so staff and students often have to travel at unusual times to save money, a lecturer at a Scottish university told Times Higher Education.

“That ends up with absurdities such as our recent trip to London when six students were each on a different train several hours apart to save money,” he said.

The hotel bill for his group “was also double what I could’ve booked it for when making the request”, he added, claiming the “inefficient” arrangements and “premium surcharges” were “a massive waste of public money when all the UK universities are totted up together”.

Tim Waterman, professor of landscape theory at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, recently highlighted how his university’s booking agent added a £3 fee to every £14 single fare he booked for students on a field trip. He told THE how corporate booking firms often “offered the worst and most expensive route”, stating that “the travel agents are always very slow to respond and thus by the time the bookings are made, they’re last minute and the costs have escalated massively”.

After tweeting about the “absolute racket” of university travel, Professor Waterman said he had been contacted by many academics “traumatised” by dealing with university travel agents, who they claimed were “rinsing research project funds”.

“There is often no saving in time for staff, who do all the booking research themselves before passing the reservation on to the travel agent. For ours, there’s even a website that walks us through how to do all our own legwork before it’s passed on to an agent for them to undo all our legwork,” he said of the “Byzantine system through which it is only possible to make the worst decisions”.

Robert Dingwall, professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University, said the route selected by the travel agent of a Russell Group university where he recently gave a guest lecture required him to walk 25 minutes between stations in Newark town centre rather than an easier across-platform change in Derby. “It claimed it would save 20 minutes on the journey but the rail fare was about £50 more than the ticket that I requested,” he told THE.

Professor Dingwall said he favoured the system used in Swedish universities where departments were issued with credit cards to spend travel budgets, with strict penalties for abuse. “There are much cheaper and better ways to do it,” he reflected.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com