Flight

Effective 1 September, 2020, American Airlines has made a change to how fare classes are utilised, specifically related to B-class fares.

There is no expected impact on Concur Travel as a result of this change. The change effected by American Airlines is generally managed in the GDS; Concur Travel relies more on the brand assignment for each fare that is provided by the GDS instead of the fare class. Concur Travel still relies on fare class assignment information for the flex faring display and for cabin designation, but neither area is affected by these changes. Specifically, American Airlines is not a flex faring airline, and the fare class changes do not change cabin designation.

Delta Air Lines has made some changes in their internal systems to follow social distancing guidelines by “dynamically” blocking centre seats between individual travellers. To support blocking seats in the GDSs effectively, the generic seat-request function needed to be disabled.

Specifically, the generic aisle/window seat request made by Concur Travel during the initial booking no longer functions for any GDS. These changes do not impact dedicated seat requests available at the end of the booking workflow, where the user may still choose a specific seat successfully.

The generic seat request functionality is expected to remain disabled until 6 Jan, 2021 as part of Delta’s dynamic seat blocking policy; customers should monitor release notes for additional updates as they become available.

As reported by the press in July, Southwest will no longer participate in the Basic Booking Request (BBR) distribution model with Sabre at the end of 2020.

Concur Travel will continue to display Southwest schedules for Sabre after 31 December, 2020. Reservations made for January travel and beyond, however, return an unconfirmed (UC) status. To ensure uninterrupted access to Southwest content via Concur Travel, customers may need to consider alternative content strategies for Southwest.

Because of the COVID-19 epidemic, Southwest Airlines has extended the validity of the unused ticket credits. Concur Travel follows these changes and ensures that the travellers do not lose their ticket credits. In September 2020, the expiry date of all impacted Southwest ticket credits stored in Concur Travel was updated to ensure that the ticket credit expiry dates reflect what was communicated by the airline.

Profile

Previously, when using the Travel Profile 2.0 API to retrieve a user’s Travel Arranger, both active and inactive Arrangers were returned for that user. With this change, the Travel Profile 2.0 API now returns only active Travel Arrangers.

By returning only the minimum amount of data required to arrange travel, SAP Concur solutions can reduce the amount of data exposed online.

Miscellaneous

Support for the Director SAML service is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel will soon begin assisting customers who currently use Director SAML to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

Clients currently using Director SAML are encouraged to migrate to SAML V2 as soon as possible.

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

SAP Concur support for Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel are currently assisting customers who use HMAC to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

In Q3 of 2020, SAP Concur plans to provide a self-service tool that will enable client admins to set up their SAML v2 connections without involving an SAP Concur support representative.

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

This release note is intended for the technical staff responsible for file migrations with SAP Concur solutions. For our customers and suppliers participating in data exchange, SAP Concur solutions is maintaining our file transfer subsystem to provide greater security for those file transfers.

SAP Concur solutions will begin migrating entities that currently use a legacy process for moving files to a more efficient and secure file routing process that relies on APIs.

These changes provide greater security and efficiency for file transfers.

Flight

For companies that participate in the American Airlines AirPass programme, Concur Travel will soon have the ability to support American Airlines’ next generation AirPass programme. This programme allows travellers to purchase unrestricted airfares at a pre-paid fixed rate.

AA AirPass travel is valid on flights marketed by American Airlines. Additional details will be added to this release note as they become available.

Profile

The current supported version of the Travel Profile API is version 2.0. However, there are still clients and partners who continue to call the Travel Profile 1.0/Profile endpoint to get user profiles. This old endpoint will be fully deprecated with the December 2020 release; users must switch to Travel Profile 2.0 API before this date.

By reducing the number of supported mechanisms for exchanging profile data, SAP Concur solutions is able to focus on providing better security, ease-of-use and additional functionality for those we support.