Flight

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.

The following three rule parts that were only available in the Flight rule group are now available in the Flight – View More Fares rule group:

• Airline is [CarrierList] and brand name is [BrandedFareNameList]

• One or more fare basis codes contain [FareBasisText]

• One or more fare basis codes do not contain [FareBasisText]

The new rule parts in the Flight – View More Fares rule group allow definition of rules based on brand name or fare basis code for fares that are retrieved when a user clicks View more fares.

Miscellaneous

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.

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

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 (targeted for Q1 2020). The new SSO self-service tool allows addition of multiple portals (Identity Providers).

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

Travel Operations / Technical Essentials

In mid-October 2019, Sabre began the roll-out of hotel bookings made 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.

In early 2017, SAP Concur announced support for simple branded fares for all Apollo, Galileo and Worldspan customers, and without need for configuration changes.

SAP Concur has been in development, in partnership with Travelport, to deliver true branded fares support for all Travelport customers. Specifically, this development will change the way Concur Travel stores the fares in the GDS PNRs; fare stores will include brand modifier(s) for branded fare airlines. This new fare store functionality will be available with the November release. During the pilot/preview phase, the fare store changes will only occur for “simple” and “complex” airlines as described in the Airlines Supported Using Concur Travel's Legacy Custom Solutions section of the Branded Fares Travel Service Guide.

Hotel

As part of our ongoing innovations of the hotel direct connect portfolio in Concur Travel, SAP Concur and HRS have developed support for HRS Payment Solutions. HRS Payment Solutions allows HRS Direct Connect customers to use:

• Global Payment

• Paperless Travel

• Central Billing

With HRS Payment Solutions support, SAP Concur clients can use the HRS payment options offered to our common clients for bookings via HRS Direct Connect:

• Global Payment: As part of Global Payment, HRS generates a virtual credit card which is used for the reservation and payment of the hotel booking

• Paperless Travel: With Paperless Travel, HRS consolidates reservation, payment and invoice data and payment data

• Central Billing: With Central Billing, HRS provides centralised hotel billing instead of many single invoices. This allows accounting departments to process in a centralised bill, which simplifies the process.

Meetings

In a future release, as part of SAP Concur’s ongoing commitment to keeping customer data secure, meeting attendees arriving from third-party registration tools will be required to authenticate before booking their travel to the event.

Miscellaneous

This feature is no longer targeted for the current release. This Release Note has been moved to the Shared Planned Changes Release Notes (English only).

Travel Operations / Technical Essentials

To 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:

• Allows better scalability and stability of Concur Travel’s Apollo/Galileo services

• Enables SAP Concur to remove legacy code used for connectivity to Apollo/Galileo, which simplifies internal operations

• May improve performance, since a more simplified connectivity approach will be used

• May improve stability

As part of its standardisation 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 fulfilment partners can programme mid-office routines around one format for all non-GDS hotel content in Concur Travel.

Over 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.