Flight

Pay As You Fly (PAF) is a premium product for Lufthansa corporate travellers. The Pay As You Fly product offers benefits that go far beyond the journey itself, based on the concept of “book, fly and pay.” With the PAF programme, bookings are made as usual via the travel agency or Concur Travel. Tickets for all confirmed segments are issued by Lufthansa, 24 hours before departure. Check-in and boarding follow Lufthansa standard procedures. Payment processing is triggered after the traveller has checked in at the airport.

PAF is available on all Lufthansa German domestic and European flights, based on one-way and point-to-point connections. This programme provides cost savings for participating companies and allows travellers the ultimate flexibility in booking their flights for corporate travel, since change and cancellation fees are not applied until tickets have been issued.

Hotel

With this release, SAP Concur is happy to announce support for Airbnb for Concur Travel as a new accommodation supplier. Airbnb is the world's largest community marketplace with nearly 5,000,000 listings in more than 81,000 cities and 191 countries.

Over 150,000 companies have signed up for Airbnb for Work to provide more accommodation choices for their employees. This integration enables companies to activate Airbnb content in Concur Travel. Employees will be able to search for accommodations that comply with their travel programmes – including entire homes.

Marriott International acquired Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 2016. As part of the integration, Marriott is migrating Starwood Preferred Guest numbers onto their technology platform and replacing all existing Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Numbers with new SPG numbers.

Note that the SPG programme is not disappearing. Marriott is simply creating new SPG numbers to better fit the Marriott platform requirements.

With this release, we will rename selected labels in the Hotel section to make them more suitable for a wider range of accommodation options – not just hotels. Generally, we will not change labels in top-level navigation or in the page footers or headers; we will change only the labels directly related to specific accommodation options.

Travelport has negotiated an exclusive rate with specific hotel properties available for all Travelport customers. The negotiated/multi-level rate access code is 4TJ. Not all properties participate and may not return the Travelport exclusive rate. Travelport will continue to add additional hotel properties to the Travelport exclusive rate programme.

SAP Concur has no plans for any special development work for this new rate code; however, customers interested in utilising this rate access code can configure it in Concur Travel just like any other consortium code.

Please refer to the Travelport Product Advisory (PA 3378) for more details: https://travelport-english.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/travelport_english.cfg/php/ma/fattach_get.php?1=AvOW~wqCDv8S~xb~Gv_y~yIvcv8qYvb7LYvB_z7~Pv8I&2=2092333 (English only)

Miscellaneous

SAP Concur announced the End of Support for plain text FTP to transfer data to and from SAP Concur.

SAP Concur has decided to provide clients an extension until 1 September, 2018, after which this functionality will be fully retired and no longer available for use. There will be no extensions beyond this date.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 1 September, 2018, SAP Concur Operations will apply a security update to our File Transfer infrastructure, restricting the use of plain text FTP as a part of our ongoing commitment to securing our customers’ data and meeting the audited security requirements of the SAP Concur Trust Platform.

Planned Innovations/Changes

The items in this section are targeted for future releases. Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.

Concur delivered a new UI for branded fares in 2016 and further enhanced in 2017, both in UI and with expanded branded fares coverage. With a future release, we will introduce our new branded fare data store to populate all branded fare information.

In addition, we will provide more brand detail in the Fare Details section, such as: Wi-Fi availability, Food and drink, Seat type, Changes, Standby, Mileage and Priority.

Concur Travel is introducing the cancellation feature for Travelfusion air bookings.

Targeted for the September release, users will be able to cancel and refund Travelfusion bookings directly in Concur Travel for airlines supporting online cancellations via Travelfusion if the fare is refundable.

Sabre will decommission the Basic Fare Shop JR. API, including the service action code OTA_AirLowFareSearchLLSRQ, including all versions. The JR. API has been in maintenance mode by Sabre for many years but will no longer be maintained. In conjunction with this change, Concur Travel will remove all references and functionality specific to JR. shopping.

All customers are strongly encouraged to ensure the Sabre pseudo city codes (PCCs) that they use are configured to use Sabre's Bargain Finder Max in advance of this change. Please contact your Sabre representative if you have questions about your PCC settings/configuration within Sabre. PCCs remaining on JR. shopping after the service is decommissioned will not function within Concur Travel.

Currently, individual or ghost cards are supported for SilverRail bookings, with SilverRail being the merchant of record. In order to provide the option for the TMC to be the merchant of record, Concur will implement the "On Account" payment feature within Concur Travel. It allows TMCs to extend credit agreements with customers that enjoy this arrangement with other modes of transport.

Concur Travel is targeting the release of this feature in September or October 2018.

Update: Targeted for March of 2019, XML Profile Sync will no longer be available. SAP Concur recommends that all customers using XML Profile Sync move to Travel Profile API 2.0 at their earliest convenience. Version 2.0 functionality has been in production since May 2015 and affords better security and data validation that will support TMCs in meeting the needs of their travellers. If TMCs need assistance in identifying their customers who are still using XML Profile Sync, SAP Concur will assist with the identification of those customers.

SAP Concur evaluated all reports that are available from within Concur Travel. The goal of the evaluation was to balance the need to meet strict data security requirements, customer usage of these reports, the availability of travel data elsewhere and the resources required to maintain the reports.

SAP Concur has identified Travel Reports that will be retired, with a planned retirement date in October 2018. Refer to the release notes for additional information and a complete list of reports.

In a future release, we will update the SAP Concur Travel wait pages to our new theme. In that update, we will lighten our branding to accommodate all customer requirements and to alleviate confusion between SAP Concur and the TMC that will fulfil the traveller bookings.

Concur Open is the SAP Concur service status dashboard, which displays known and widespread outages and incidents for select SAP Concur services and all data centres. Concur Open displays the current service status as well as incident history for the past 20 days.

In a future release, there will be new functionality added to Concur Open. Users can continue to access Concur Open and view Concur service availability; no functionality will be removed. However, with the release, SAP Concur users will be able to log in to Concur Open and:

• View service status for the services and the data centre that are specific to their company

• Access subscription options for updates about the incidents that affect the services specific to their company

• View service history for the past two years as well as detailed root cause analysis information and the actions taken by SAP Concur for specific incidents

Client Notifications

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur list of Subprocessors (English Only)

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition