December 2019 Travel Standard Edition Admin Summary
Initial Post
Release Note Summaries
Flight
Flex Faring Update for Canadian Domestic TravelSAP Concur Travel has supported a special airfare shopping view, called flex faring, for several years. With the flex faring view, travelers can compare differences between fares and brands available on a given flight, combine fares with varying restrictions, and evaluate prices from multiple airlines all on one screen.
The flex faring view requires SAP Concur to maintain a special database to store fare information for each supported airline – to include brand structure, fare details and cabin assignments – using booking codes (RBD) to define each “bucket” in the Flex Faring view.
Based on this, Concur Travel will disable Flex Faring for Standard Travel sites for this release. Up until now, Flex Faring was auto-enabled for Canada. This supports the Air Canada migration; Flex Faring must be disabled to view Air Canada search results from Travelfusion. If Air Canada via Travelfusion is enabled, users and arrangers will see fares/brands by leg in the search results and be able to combine them as needed.
Miscellaneous
Changes to Concur Open and Personalized Concur OpenTargeted for December 19, several changes will be made to Concur Open and Personalized Concur Open.
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Subscription Services: Email and RSS subscriptions for service status notifications will be available only through Personalized Concur Open, which displays the service issues specific to a customer's organization. Current Concur Open subscriptions for SAP Concur customers will be migrated to Personalized Concur Open.
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Notification Email "From" Address: The notification email address will be updated from openupdates@concur.com to ConcurOpenUpdates@sap.com. Customers should ensure that they have added the @sap.com domain to their Safe Sender List and that users have updated any personal email inbox rules.
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Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Reports: After each incident, a preliminary RCA report will be published, followed by a final RCA report that contains a more complete analysis with corrective actions. Both reports will be published only in Personalized Concur Open.
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Service Availability Status: To better reflect customer impact, the Performance Issue icon and Partial Performance Issue icon will be removed from Concur Open and Personalized Concur Open.
These changes provide better information for customers while also removing some of the information that is currently available to non-customers.
File Transfer Updates: New SAP Concur IP Address (EMEA)This release note is intended for technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur. For our customers and vendors participating in data exchange through various secure file transfer protocols, SAP Concur is making changes that provide greater security for those file transfers.
SAP Concur changed the IP address for st-eu.concursolutions.com from 84.14.175.233 to 46.243.56.11 on November 23, 2019.
Clients whose file transfers protocols use the SAP Concur DNS endpoint (st eu.concursolutions.com) to connect are not impacted by this change.
Clients who connect via IP address need to connect to the SAP Concur DNS endpoint (st-eu.concursolutions.com) or the new IP address.
SAP Concur recommends connecting to DNS endpoint st-eu.concursolutions.com to avoid connection issues if the SAP Concur IP address changes again in the future.
This change provides greater security for file transfers.
Language Selection Page DeprecationAfter a user selects a different language from the Change language list and then signs in with their credentials to SAP Concur, a page appears prompting them to confirm which language to use as it applies to the current session (for example, their latest selection or what is specified as default in their profile), or whether they want to use the latest selected language for the current session and also update the default language in their profile to that selection.
Targeted for this December release, this page will no longer appear. Instead, any language that the user selects from the Change language list will be used for the current session. To update their default language, the user can make the change under their Profile settings.
Removal of this page removes the recurrence of preferred language issues and simplifies the user experience.
Travel Operations / Technical Essentials
Sabre: New Content Services for Lodging (CSL)Sabre has begun to roll out the ability to make hotel bookings with their new CSL services through Sabre Red 360. Concur Travel does not use the Sabre Red 360 functionality but understands that bookings made outside of Concur Travel may be created with these new services. Based on Sabre’s documentation, TMCs would need to specifically opt-in as this functionality is not automatically enabled.
These CSL services are also available for technology providers, such as SAP Concur for use within the various travel products. SAP Concur is currently evaluating these new services and is investigating how to provide support for them in the future.
**Ongoing** Apollo/Galileo: Migrate Legacy Web Services to Galileo Web ServicesTo retire legacy connectivity with Travelport, Concur Travel is migrating from the XML Select connectivity platform to the Galileo Web Services connectivity platform. This change benefits SAP Concur customers as follows:
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Allows better scalability and stability of Concur Travel’s Apollo/Galileo services
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Enables SAP Concur to remove legacy code used for connectivity to Apollo/Galileo, which simplifies internal operations
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May improve performance, since a more simplified connectivity approach will be used
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May improve stability
While this connectivity change should be seamless for end users, it does require an access-related change that will affect agency fulfillment partners (TMCs). With this change, SAP Concur will require the Host Access Profile (HAP) for the booking pseudo city code.
**TMC Preview** Travelport Branded Fares – Full SupportIn early 2017, SAP Concur announced support for simple branded fares for all Apollo, Galileo, and Worldspan customers, and without need for configuration changes.
In the July 2017 release, SAP Concur announced support for an interim solution to provide branded fare content in Apollo and Galileo for the more complex branding schemes. SAP Concur was unable to extend this interim solution to Worldspan due to technical limitations.
The interim solution for complex branded fares requires some operational changes for fulfillment travel agencies, so it is a configurable feature. Due to the operational complexities, SAP Concur has limited this functionality to certain airlines.
Planned Change Summaries
The items in this section are summaries of the changes targeted for future releases. SAP Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.
IMPORTANT: These Planned Changes may not be all of the upcoming enhancements and modifications that affect this SAP Concur product or service. The Planned Changes that apply to multiple SAP Concur products and/or services are in a consolidated document. Please review the additional Planned Changes admin summaries available in the December 2019 Shared Planned Changes Standard Edition Admin Summary.
Travel Operations / Technical Essentials
**Planned Changes** HRS: Update Hotel Passive SegmentAs part of its standardization effort, SAP Concur will be updating the standard hotel passive format for all GDS.
Once SAP Concur has migrated all hotel partners to the new hotel platform (HS2), agency fulfillment partners can program mid-office routines around one format for all non-GDS hotel content in Concur Travel.
**Planned Changes** Worldspan: Fare Store ChangesOver many years, SAP Concur has supported several options around fare storing for Worldspan. This has presented a high level of complexity for Worldspan PNR support. Recently, SAP Concur has seen that some of the legacy options are not well suited to work with newer industry faring, such as the Exclude Unbundled Economy Fares option (FXD modifier).
To reduce support costs and to ensure SAP Concur is using the most up-to-date pricing methods for our Worldspan customers, SAP Concur will make several changes over the coming months.
**Planned Changes** Amadeus: Support for Ticket ChangerHistorically, SAP Concur has offered post-ticket change capabilities for Sabre (via Sabre Automated Exchanges), Worldspan (via Rapid Reprice), and Apollo (via Worldspan cross-GDS Rapid Reprice).
With a future release, Concur Travel will also support exchange capabilities for Amadeus via Amadeus Ticket Changer. More details about this feature will be provided as soon as they are available.
Amadeus customers will be able to make changes to their ticketed reservations online, eliminating the need to call their agency.
Amadeus agency fulfillment partners can automate exchange processing for Concur Travel customers, saving time and travel consultant resources.
Client Notifications
SAP Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors
The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur list of Subprocessors (English Only)
Monthly Browser Certifications
Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Standard Edition
