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Nearly three-quarters of DTS users said the system isn't accessible; two-thirds said it wasn't easy to understand or navigate. And more than 50 percent of users said they weren't satisfied park central new york hotel with the customer service they received from the Defense Travel Management Office (DTMO), which oversees the system.
The survey was conducted from June 29 through Sept. 20. About 400 users responded to the survey � the format of the results makes it difficult to say exactly how many. The respondents are a mix of civilian and military personnel; some are travelers, others are travel managers.
"It's awful. park central new york hotel Overall it's just confusing ... difficult to use, cumbersome to use," said one Army civilian employee in an interview with Federal Times . "It takes me hours every time I want to fill out a travel claim."
Defense Department spokeswoman park central new york hotel Cynthia Smith said the data was not scientific; it was gathered through a customer satisfaction poll, not a more formal park central new york hotel survey. The department declined to comment on the specific results of this poll, saying it would review the data at the end of the quarter on Sept. 30.
"I think DTS is one of the best government park central new york hotel systems park central new york hotel out there," Johnson park central new york hotel said. "We're processing vouchers within two or three days. ... The system is good, when it runs the way it should. Can we do better, though? Of course."
But Defense Department employees interviewed by Federal Times confirmed the poll's findings; many of them complained about archaic rules and a cumbersome user interface that make the system hard to use.
"Usually you're traveling for a project, and your project is assigned a pot of money, park central new york hotel so you punch that into the system," a Navy employee said. "But it doesn't remember your accounting information, so every time you travel, you have to re-enter those account numbers. It's annoying ... and it creates a huge potential for error."
Another Navy employee said he recently submitted a claim for travel that he took in his own car. He took an alternate route to his destination that wound up being shorter than the route calculated by DTS. That saved money for the department � but DTS required him to justify why he took the shorter route.
That Navy employee's anecdote mirrors a finding from a Government Accountability Office report on DTS released earlier this year. The report criticized "rigid rules" in the system, like one that requires travel managers to manually approve any difference between park central new york hotel the travel authorization and the cost of the trip � even if the actual cost was less than the authorization.
Johnson acknowledged that many users find the system difficult to use. But he blamed that on the department's complicated travel policies, not on technology. For example, the Defense Department has 73 types of travel, such as medical travel, permanent park central new york hotel changes of station and temporary duty assignments, with different sets of rules and procedures for each. DTS supports more than 60 of those.
Many DTS users do think the technology is a problem, though, particularly the user interface. Just 19 percent of respondents agreed that DTS is easy to navigate; 68 percent disagreed, with two-thirds park central new york hotel of them saying they "strongly disagreed."
"Users were looking for a simplified screen ... that was one of our findings, that it was cumbersome for people to find information," Khan said. "They wanted information available on a single screen, and instead they had to click through five or six."
Several users interviewed by Federal Times echoed those complaints. One said he expected the system to have a wizard to walk him through booking a trip; instead, he found a bewildering series of screens.
The results park central new york hotel of this study are slightly worse than the system's last usability survey, conducted last year by LMI Government Consulting. That survey found that travelers were able to successfully use DTS just 42 percent of the time; more than half of the users surveyed said they would rather use a commercial travel office than the 11-year-old park central new york hotel DTS.
Legislators have held a number of hearings about DTS in recent years, and they often share horror stories from Defense employees: One congressman told a story earlier this year of a civilian employee park central new york hotel stranded in Turkey because he couldn't get help to book a flight.
"You talk to the help desk, and they place you in a queue," park central new york hotel the employee said. "And unless you're traveling the next day, you have to wait a long time to get a call back I've waited three or four days. Once you get through, they're actually very good. But the problem is getting through."
Johnson said wait times have probably lengthened recently because the latest upgrade to the DTS system, released Aug. 8, has caused persistent problems. DTS is now in a "degraded" status, which means some of its functions have not been working properly since the upgrade.
"We've done some scientific studies, and the customer service is actually rated pretty high," Johnson said. "I visited the Travel Assistance Center recently, and the average wait time wasn't more than three to five minutes."
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