Administration

For customers that have enabled Southwest Airlines Direct Connect, when using an international credit card, the Postal Code field for the credit card billing address is no longer required unless the country indicated is the US (US) or Canada (CA).

Customers with international credit cards (non-US and non-CA) are no longer required to enter data in the Postal Code field.

Flight

Concur Travel is addressing a defect in the Express Checkout feature. As of now, when the Delayed LLF feature is in use, a trip cannot be booked using the Express Checkout workflow. When the Express checkout is disqualified, the user is automatically taken to the legacy checkout workflow.

The introduction of the Air Canada migration has created an opportunity for SAP Concur to provide an enhanced, scalable and stable user experience leveraging the latest technology with Travelfusion. As a result, Air Canada travellers will have a similar, high quality direct connect experience already available to SAP Concur customers across the globe who use Travelfusion today.

Customers that source their Air Canada content from the GDS will experience no change. Customers that currently source Air Canada content from Air Canada Direct Connect will have the option to source from the GDS and/or enable Air Canada content from Travelfusion.

Air Canada via Travelfusion is targeted for the September 2019 release.

The Air Canada Direct Connect will no longer be available as of 31 October, 2019.

Air Canada content via Travelfusion will provide features and/or fares that are not available via the GDS and improve upon what was previously only available via Air Canada Direct Connect. By moving to Travelfusion, users will see an updated user interface and more streamlined booking process.

When using Sabre and View More Fares is enabled, users will now be presented with branded fares as options. With the added AllBrandsPricing web service functionality, Concur Travel will no longer use simple pricing commands to get the lowest refundable and non-refundable brands in each cabin, but will instead present the user with all the available or applicable brands for the specifically requested itinerary.

Users can now access the lowest branded fares for round-trip, multi-city and one-way bookings that are also available in Sabre. They no longer need to book the lowest branded fare via a TMC or pay the higher air fare.

In recent months, Air France made significant changes to their Abonnement programme fares, causing the Abonnement feature in SAP Concur to stop working as expected. The nature of the change requires that SAP Concur rebuild the entire feature and introduce new custom functionality.

Much of the GDS behaviour with the Abonnement programme is undocumented. For this reason, SAP Concur is taking an iterative approach to restoring this functionality, and this list may change to include additional items to address based on customer feedback.

Airlines are increasingly utilising the IATA New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard to offer products that may not currently be available in Global Distribution Systems (GDS).

As part of SAP Concur’s commitment to ensuring clients have access to all relevant content, including NDC-sourced content, we are pleased to announce the Select Access programme will now include an option for sourcing Lufthansa and British Airways NDC content via Travelfusion.

Clients in some markets have an important need to access new airline content (for example, brands, bundles, ancillaries) that is not available in the GDS.

Miscellaneous

Targeted for 8 AM PT, 14 October, 2019, SAP Concur will no longer support the following unsecure SSH protocol algorithms/ciphers:

• (key exchange) diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1

• (encryption) aes128-cbc

• (encryption) aes192-cbc

• (encryption) aes256-cbc

• (message authentication code) hmac-md5

• (message authentication code) hmac-sha1-96

• (message authentication code) hmac-md5-96

These changes provide greater security for file transfers.

This release note is intended for technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur. For our customers and suppliers 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 will implement source Internet Protocol (IP) checking for all European, Middle Eastern, and African (EMEA) file transfer accounts on 21 October, 2019.

These changes provide greater security for file transfers.

When a user signs in to SAP Concur, one of the validation processes includes checking for and adhering to any IP Restrictions (IPRs). IPRs are specific IPs or IP ranges that are defined by a company to restrict the IPs from which their users can sign in to SAP Concur. An IPR can be a string that contains a list of acceptable IP addresses and/or IP address patterns, for example: "170.242.6.43;170.243.70.42;170.243.70.43;171.159.*.*".

Customers who use IPRs can be assured that the IPRs apply to the entire company.

As part of our ongoing commitment to e-receipts and the effortless expense claim, air e-receipts generated by SAP Concur based on ticket and coupon data from GDS and some TripLink transactions have been updated.

This change brings air e-receipts up to SAP Concur’s standard e-receipt format, providing users with a more consistent experience. The format is also more convenient for users working in SAP Concur's new Expense user interface, NextGen Expense. This change also eliminates a performance/stability issue for end users who would sometimes not see new air e-receipts as quickly as they should.

For those customers who use the SAP Concur Quick Help, be aware that it will be expanded with this release. Quick Help helps manage diverse customer expectations with a wide variety of support resources in the form of multi-step tutorials, help videos and documents easily available when they log into their SAP Concur resources.

In addition to self-service content, the Quick Help tool makes it easier for the customer's SAP Concur admin to contact SAP Concur for assistance via chat and phone.

SAP Concur Quick Help tool is used to accelerate customer onboarding and to create a quick and efficient way for customers to find easy-to-access help on their own while they’re logged into their SAP Concur site.

Targeted for October 2019, the SAP Concur Sign In page will be updated, providing a new login experience for both direct SAP Concur username/password users and Single Sign-On (SSO) users. SSO users will start the SP-initiated SSO login process at www.concursolutions.com.

The new SAP Concur Sign In page features a two-step login process that provides enhanced security, meets current industry standards and provides a better login success rate. This feature is targeted for late October 2019.

This feature provides better security and a faster, convenient experience for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

Recently, SAP Concur support introduced the Co-browse feature for all Authorised Support Contacts (ASCs). With this release, SAP Concur End User Support will provide the same screen-share service for companies that use the User Support Desk (USD) service. USD is an SAP Concur service that provides direct Help Desk services for the company's end users. These end users will now be able to use the co-browse feature.

Screen sharing often makes a problem easier to describe, easier to understand and quicker to resolve – saving time for end users and SAP Concur support.

Single Sign-On allows users to access multiple applications using one set of login credentials. Currently, SAP Concur has two methods for signing in: with a user name and password or using SSO with Identity Provider (IdP) credentials, such as a user's login credentials for their organisation.

Targeted for the end of October 2019 (not the scheduled monthly release date), SAP Concur is planning to add a Manage Single Sign-On (SSO) feature to SAP Concur products, which provides clients with a self-service option for setting up SSO for their organisation. SSO is currently supported for Concur Expense, Invoice, Request and Travel.

This feature provides SAP Concur customers with a self-service option for setting up SSO and for existing SSO customers who must eventually migrate to the new SSO service to manage SSO for their users.

Strong customer authentication (SCA) is a requirement of the EU Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) on payment service providers within the European Economic Area. The SCA requirement becomes effective on 14 September, 2019. The directive requires that purchasers in certain online electronic transactions be authenticated using multi-factor techniques to increase security and reduce fraud opportunities.

It is up to each travel supplier and bank/card issuer to determine on a transaction by transaction basis whether this extra level of authentication is required. There are many exemptions to this rule including – but not limited to – corporate payments, virtual payments and payments made via the GDS.

SAP Concur will soon begin the deprecation process of removing Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) as an SSO option. The replacement service for HMAC is SAML SSO, which will be a self-service method of setup whereby Company Admins will have access within SAP Concur to complete their SAML connections.

Clients currently using HMAC are encouraged to migrate to the SSO self-service tool as soon as it is released. The new SSO self-service tool will be offered as a free feature to all clients. The new SSO self-service tool allows multiple portals (Identity Providers) to be added.

This change provides better security and improved support for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.