The purpose of the lab is to continue promoting OffSite as a planning tool for Federal employees. Our customers need to know where the least expensive locations are to hold meetings, conferences, or training events given geographically dispersed participants. We developed OffSite 99 as an easy to use tool for meeting coordinators to quickly compare travel costs between a wide variety of alternative locations. We serve as Co-Directors and focus our efforts on updating travel cost data, customer support, advertising, and distribution. We developed a methodology for selecting conference and training sites from 277 cities using a cost function that minimizes both travel and temporary duty costs for attendees.
Users enter each participant's departure location and the conference duration.
OffSite 99 returns a rank ordered selection of potential conference sites. One of the hurdles we faced while working on this problem was the realization that the government-contracted airfares and established per diem rates we obtained were inconsistently presented. Another challenge of the project was that Jeff and I were on different coasts and in different time zones. Jeff lived in Monterey, California and I was in Richmond, Virginia. To overcome this problem, we used the Internet and teleconferencing to get the majority of the work done.