Press Corps,
I want to let you know about a breakthrough I think we’ve had with the White House on the AF One travel bills. As many of you know, our bills for air travel spiked wildly starting with trips taken in February.
When those bills rolled in, we asked some questions, and things started happening. Josh Earnest launched a review, which turned up more information than I’d ever seen before about how the bills are put together. And then last week he presented a new formula to us, along with a plan to recalculate all of the bills for trips starting in mid-February.
The new formula says press travel with the president or vice president will be calculated “at the lowest available fare that is unrestricted, fully refundable, and available for purchase by the general public.” Reimbursement will be based on fares available between 7 – 14 days in advance of travel.
As it turns out, the old standard simply said “full coach fare” and that allowed for a whole range of choices by the folks in the military office who were doing the bills.
As of now, the White House Travel Office is taking over the calculations from the military office. They propose to recalculate all bills issued since Feb. 14 and to issue new invoices for all travel since that date. Refunds will be issued for those who paid the old bills, beginning as early as today.
The travel office hopes to finish sending out new bills by the end of October.
Here’s one sign of how the formula will change things: the February trip to California will go from the roughly $17,000 previously billed to about $3,500.
Other recalculations will look like this:
Miami, March 20
Billed: $4540
New: $1049
Pittsburgh, April 16
Initial invoice: $2001
New: $1138
New York, May 15
Initial invoice: $2194
New: $728
Chicago, May 23
Initial invoice: $3587
New: $1162
Though the White House says it wasn’t their intent to lower costs for us, but rather to provide the transparency and predictability that we had asked for, it looks to us like the costs will improve not just when compared to the period of the cost spikes but also when compared to the pre-spike period.
Here’s how that looks to us:
Chicago, IL to JBA
5/30/2013 – $1461.00 per person
4/2/2014 – $1469.00 per person
5/23/2014 – $3587.00 per person
5/23/2014 (updated fare) – $1162.00 per person
Palm Springs, CA to JBA
6/9/2013 – $1811.00 per person
2/17/2014 – $7051.00 per person
2/17/2014 (updated fare) – $1323.00 per person
Miami, FL to JBA
6/12/2013 – $1228.00 per person
3/20/2014 – $4540.00 per person
3/20/2014 (updated fare) – $1049.00 per person
New York, NY to JBA
10/25/2013 – $865.00 per person
5/15/2014 – $2194.00 per person
5/15/2014 (updated fare) – $728.00 per person
Pittsburgh, PA to JBA
7/6/2012 – $982.00 per person
4/16/2014 – $2001.00 per person
4/16/2014 (updated fare) – $1138.00 per person
Any member of the WHCA board can go on at length about the process that got us to this point. If you want lots of detail about how it works, ask me or Todd Gillman, a longtime traveler who has been raising this issue for years and then joined in the talks after he was elected to the board this summer.
If you have specific questions, please direct them to us first to see if we can handle them. We’d like to keep the travel office free to get these bills out as quickly as they can.
In the meantime, I hope any of you who were thinking about dropping out of the traveling pool because of the wild spikes will reconsider that idea. Your part in the pool process is critical, and the loss of even one news org would be a huge detriment.
Best,
Christi