Administration

SAP Concur is currently migrating TMCs to new Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres, a process which affects TMC workflows. SAP will first move TMCs to the new data centres, followed over time by their customers. TMCs will therefore experience a period of time where their customer base is split over the current data centres and the new AWS data centres.

We are migrating from a private platform, where all equipment is owned by SAP Concur solutions, to a third-party cloud platform. This will provide stronger security, improved performance and stability, and faster innovation for our customers.

With this change, the Company Administrator > User Administration > User Details page > Travel Settings > User Group Membership list displays Group IDs in brackets next to the listed Group Names. Previously, only Group Names were displayed.

Companies who wish to use the User Provisioning Service API (UPS) and Travel Extension to add users into Concur Travel must provide Group IDs in order to assign users into Travel Groups. This change allows companies to have a list of Group IDs that can be used with UPS. There is no other user interface where Group IDs are displayed to Admin users.

Flight

In Concur Travel, the Ancillary, Trusted Traveller Programme and Traveller Data content in the Flight Options box are controlled by the supplier. Airlines can introduce new ancillaries while authorities can introduce new regulations for Traveller Data collection at any time. These new options may dynamically appear in the Flight Options box without prior notice.

At the beginning of February, some Brazilian airlines started to collect passport number, country of issue and expiry date as mandatory data; users were not able to complete a booking without filling in these fields.

SAP Concur has worked with the airlines and Travelfusion to ensure that the specified passport data is not mandatory during the booking process. Users can choose to provide passport information during booking or during check-in.

The obligation of collecting the travel document information is determined by governmental regulations. Based on changing regulations, airlines may reintroduce mandatory fields in the Flight Options box without notifying customers or partners.

Hotel

For this release, by mutual agreement, Airbnb and Concur Travel is disabling the Airbnb Direct Connect as a source of content in Concur Travel and is decommissioning the unique punch-out booking experience within the Concur Online Booking Tool. Existing connections are removed; no new connections to Airbnb will be made.

Affected clients may work with Airbnb, their TMC and their administrator to arrange Airbnb bookings via alternate channels, and/or to enable alternative hotel content connectors in Concur Travel.

Existing Airbnb itineraries will remain visible in Concur Travel under My Trips.

Periodically, under-supported third party features may be removed to ensure usability standards are maintained. This feature is not fully supported and will therefore be removed.

Profile

SAP Concur will remove the Connected Apps page, https://www.concursolutions.com/profile/ProfileUserOauth.asp, from the Concur Travel and Expense user interface.

Periodically, under-utilised features or pages must be removed to improve usability. This is a rarely used page; it no longer meets its purpose of driving partner application usage.

Flight

Currently, users are not able to make flight changes via Travelport Galileo after a ticket has been issued. As of this release, post-ticket exchange functionality is available for Travelport Galileo customers with the Post Ticket Change feature enabled.

This change allows users to change Travelport Galileo airline flights through Concur Travel after a ticket has been issued.

Aer Lingus Direct Connect content is offered via Travelfusion in Concur Travel. Currently, customers can use the legacy Aer Lingus supplier without airline credentials and the Aer Lingus (B2B) supplier with airline credentials. With the upcoming release, customers will be able to use the Aer Lingus (B2B) connection with or without credentials in Concur Travel.

We encourage all customers to migrate to the Aer Lingus B2B supplier as it offers greater support and stability than the legacy supplier. In the future, the legacy Aer Lingus supplier will be decommissioned in Concur Travel. We will provide further details closer to the decommission date.

By switching to the Aer Lingus (B2B) supplier, users will experience a more stable and reliable booking flow with less booking failures, compared to the legacy supplier. Customers may obtain their own credential set from Air Lingus, if they have negotiated content with the airline. The Aer Lingus (B2B) connection works with or without credentials; users can book published fares as they would in the Aer Lingus website.

Profile

When implementing new indirect customers on SAP Concur products, TMCs have previously had different options for creating a new company configuration. They could:

• manually create a new configuration,
• clone an existing configuration or
• complete the Online Order Form that generates a request for a new configuration to be created.

SAP Concur is making billing system updates, targeted for a future release. TMCs will now be required to complete and submit the Online Order Form for all configuration creations, includes test configurations. Cloned and manually created configurations will not be enabled until the Online Order Form is completed and submitted.

This feature change has no impact to Concur Travel users.

The XML Profile Sync, which is used to synchronise Concur Travel user profile data with TMC partners, will no longer be available, targeted for Q1 2022. We advise all partners to engage with SAP Concur representatives to adopt the Travel Profile v2 API for managing Concur Travel user profiles.

The XML Profile Sync was officially decommissioned in 2016 due to instability and other issues. The Travel Profile v2 API was built to replace this legacy synchronisation process. It has now reached such a level of stability and maturity that there is no longer any reason to maintain multiple profile sync options.