As this is a government contract, and there are strict public transparency rules on government contracts, I went digging. Here's the call for tenders: https://

As this is a government contract, and there are strict public transparency rules on government contracts, I went digging. Here's the call for tenders: https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=8749 https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... And here's the award: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:120998-2022:TEXT:EN:HTML&tabId=1 https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:120998-2022:TEXT:EN... Some interesting things: 1. This is a broad framework contract for marketing, for the eye-watering amount of 300 million euro. The title is "Belgium-Brussels: Framework Service Contract for the Organisation of Large-scale Travels of Participants in the Context of Erasmus+/DiscoverEU" The reason they do these kinds of framework contracts is because the legally required tendering procedures surrounding government contracts are so onerous that it's better to do a broad contract once and bundle a lot of projects inside of them, than to have one contract per project. 2. The executing party (Caracal) is nowhere to be seen, instead the contract is awarded to EURail and MCI. EURail is the intermediary I suspect, responsible for navigating the wild world of government contracting, and MCI is a marketing agency. They have no doubt built up years of expertise in how to successfully navigate these kinds of tendering procedures, and they probably are not the lowest bidder. Caracal is no doubt subcontracted by MCI, but as MCI is a private company we cannot see how much they were paid or how they were selected. So much for transparency. In my own experience in government contracting, price is a factor but usually not the largest factor. There's a large set of requirements (which you can read through if you follow the first link), and the ability to prove that you will be able to meet them is mostly what determines who wins the contract. However, because it is so difficult to know how to do that, only a few parties will have submitted a tender, and the best of a poor batch may still not be very good. Personally I think this kind of public procurement legislation is well intended but ultimately flawed. It does not result in lower costs, faster turnaround, better transparency, or overall better government. I'm in favor of transparency rules, but they need to be a lot more thorough and they need to cover subcontracting as well. I'm against public tendering legislation, as I think it prevents the government from being efficient. (By the way, how awful is that public tendering website? It's like a flashback to 2003. No doubt built under one of those big framework contracts.)