Park Service

Concessioners play a significant role in providing services to millions of visitors to the nation's national parks each year. However, GAO previously reported that the condition of lodging facilities varies from park to park. This report discusses the factors affecting the condition of lodging facilities in the national park system and the options available to address them. After considering many site-specific factors that could affect the condition of lodging facilities--such as whether the facilities were used year-round or just seasonally, whether the facilities were owned by the government or by the concessioner, and whether the facilities were designated as historic structures--GAO found that the most significant factor was the Park Service's overall approach to managing the program. Specifically, the Park Service's management problems center on three areas: (1) inadequate qualifications and training of the agency's concessions specialists and concessions contracting staff, (2) the agency's out-of-date practices in handling its contracting workloads and chronic backlog of expired contracts, and (3) a lack of accountability within the concessions program.

GAO noted that: (1) after considering numerous site-specific factors that could potentially affect the condition of lodging facilities--such as whether the facilities were used year-round or just seasonally, whether the facilities were owned by the government or by the concessioner, whether the facilities were designated as historic structures, and others--GAO found that the most significant factors are those involving the agency's overall approach to managing the program; (2) specifically, the management problems center on three areas: (a) inadequate qualifications and training of the agency's concessions specialists and concession contracting staff; (b) the agency's out-of-date practices in handling its contracting workload and chronic backlog of expired contracts; and (c) a lack of accountability within the concessions program; (3) for the most part, these problems are long-standing and are consistent with similar concerns raised by the Department of the Interior, its Office of the Inspector General, and National Park Service concessions staff; (4) because of these problems, the Park Service frequently has difficulty managing the performance of its concessioners to ensure a consistent level of quality in the services and facilities they provide; (5) the Park Service has two principal options for dealing with the problems identified in its management of the concessions program: (a) using better hiring and training practices to professionalize its workforce and thus obtain better business and contracting expertise; or (b) contracting out to acquire the needed business and contracting expertise; (6) these two options are not mutually exclusive in that the agency could contract for expertise in certain functions while developing expertise in-house for other functions; (7) both options require that the agency better manage its human capital to ensure that it selects, trains, develops, and manages concessions staff who have the skills needed to bring about improvement in the concessions program; (8) regardless of what options--or combination of options--it selects, the agency needs to strengthen its accountability for control of the program; and (9) unless this is done, the effectiveness of other changes to the program will likely be diminished.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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