July 20, 2012, (Written by AH&LA) – The General Services Administration (GSA) is seeking to reduce travel costs by changing the way it calculates per diem rates (GSA sets hotel per diem rates for the federal government). Smith Travel Research (STR) provides GSA with room rate data from hotels throughout the United States. GSA determines hotel average daily rates (ADR) by including rates from hotels in the “mid-price range.” Those rates are gathered from independent, midscale, upscale, upper upscale properties. GSA omits rates from economy and luxury hotels from the data as it considers them outside the mid-price range (too low and too high, respectively).