Hotel

Corporate Discounts Notes allow Concur Travel administrators to include additional information specific to the hotel to help travellers compare and select their hotel choice, for example:

• parking fitness centre
• airport shuttle
• breakfast

Corporate Discounts Notes are configured through the Manage Corporate Discounts Administration page. Previously, Corporate Discounts Notes could be displayed only for properties sourced directly by Concur Travel from the GDS. Corporate Discounts Notes could not be displayed for properties returned exclusively from Hotel Service v2 providers, including Custom Hotel Sourcing providers.

As of March 2021, Corporate Discount Notes written against GDS property IDs are automatically displayed for the matching property returned to the Hotel Service v2 interface. The link will be facilitated by mapping between the CHS provider IDs and the GDS IDs via the properties’ GIATA IDs.

This enhancement will ensure a consistent experience for all users by providing the ability to view Corporate Discounts Notes for properties which were previously not available through Custom Hotel Sourcing.

With this update, Concur has certified BCD TripSource® as an Authorised CHS Provider that can manage all hotel content in the Concur Travel online booking tool for designated Concur Travel configurations. Specifically, the TripSource 2 hotel connector has been verified and found to meet Concur Travel’s standards for Custom Hotel Sourcing.

Customers will have access to curated content from BCD TripSource® with hotel rate discounts from many sources, including vendors, third-party aggregators and GDSs. Travellers will be able to shop and book hotel inventory and access supplemental services. By managing all hotel content, BCD TripSource® is better able to customise the display and sort order of specific properties and rates.

Profile

In the current Travel Profile 2.0 API, the request to get travel profile summaries has one required parameter: LastModifiedDate. This allows users to get profile summaries of other users whose profiles have changed since that date. SAP Concur development discovered a defect where this required parameter is not enforced. So today, if a user omits the parameter LastModifiedDate, they receive profile summaries for all of their users.

Beginning in February 2021, SAP Concur development enforced the inclusion of the LastModifiedDate parameter, as documented. Users who omit LastModifiedDate will receive an error.

For users who would like to get profile summaries for all of their users, they can set LastModifiedDate to 1900-01-01T12:00:00.

Fixing this defect to match current documentation ensures a consistent and improved experience for all users.

Miscellaneous

SAP Concur has added the Service Description Guide link to the Help menu on the SAP Concur home page.

This change is provided in accordance with SAP Concur Legal requirements.

This update allows access to the Service Description guide from within SAP Concur products.

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).

SAP Concur provides a Single Sign-On self-service option that enables client admins to setup 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 is in the process of 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

In February 2020, SAP Concur and CIBT launched a new integration method through the Concur App Centre, where the new CIBT app has been available since then. The legacy integration method with CIBT is still supported during a transition period but SAP Concur will eventually retire the Legacy Batch File protocol integration method. The original retirement date announced with the release notes in February 2020 was November 2020. To give our customers and business partners more time for the transition and to ease a little the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic may have had on some organisations, SAP Concur has decided to extend the transition period. The retirement will be communicated prior to the release.

The CIBT service is available for additional countries. Travellers whose profiles are associated with a Concur Travel configuration based in Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway or Sweden can now benefit from CIBT’s visa services.

CIBT has integrated with SAP Concur’s Itinerary API and Travel Profile API and has released an App Centre Connector to facilitate the continuous, real-time flow of itineraries to better serve clients and travellers.

CIBT will be able to support clients and travellers in more countries and with a more stable, scalable integration. The new integration method also reduces configuration effort for admin users in Concur Travel.

Concur Travel currently provides scheduled Wi-Fi availability for a flight, and the ability to purchase Wi-Fi access in advance for a select number of airlines via Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi.

The feature was introduced in the early days of in-plane Wi-Fi when this capability was less widely available.

Targeted for the April 2021 release, this feature will be decommissioned for the following reasons:

• Most users purchase this product in-flight rather than in advance; accordingly, it is not optimal to have this item for purchase in the air shopping path of the booking tool.
• Other Wi-Fi options are available to travellers in addition to the Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi product. The Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi indicator icon for scheduled flights does not fully reflect available Wi-Fi offerings and capabilities across the entire global airline landscape.
• eReceipts are not supported (requires manual reimbursement process for travellers).
• The Concur Travel vision for Flight includes the introduction of more comprehensive and universal coverage of airline product details, including Wi-Fi offering by flight.

Concur Travel currently provides travellers with the capability to purchase Park ‘N Fly off-airport parking near certain airports at a discounted rate at the time of booking.

This feature was provided to offer a cost-effective alternative to on-airport parking at many airports in the United States.

Targeted for the April release, Park ‘N Fly will become a maintained feature (feature requests or support cases will no longer be accepted). Targeted for the June release, this feature will be decommissioned for the following reasons:

• Continued pre-pandemic declines in usage of Park ‘N Fly booked via Concur Travel, combined with requirements to maintain the service and necessary functional updates (such as airport locations due to permanent Park ‘N Fly location closings), makes future investment in this feature uneconomical.
• Other discounted off-airport parking options are available to travellers in addition to the Park ‘N Fly product. A generic parking solution that is limited to US locations does not fully reflect all offerings and capabilities across the global off-airport parking landscape.
• eReceipts are not supported (requires manual reimbursement process for travellers).

Concur Travel now supports a new version of seat maps using the Travelport Universal API (uAPI) platform.

The SAP Concur Dev team will run a pilot with pre-selected customers and TMCs, targeted for the first week of April. The new seat map is targeted for release to all customers by the end of the second quarter.

The new seat map user experience is accurate and reliable, and it considers the customer’s Frequent Flyer status and the fare type selected. The old seat maps did not account for either of these.

The new seat map provides an improved seat selection success rate as we now have a better understanding of seat availability.

Priority (P2) Communications

Concur Travel Priority 2 (P2) Communications are currently published and available on a concurtraining.com landing page. Targeted for April 2021, the Travel P2s will be published on the Personalised Concur Open dashboard. At the same time, the concurtraining.com landing page for P2s will be archived. They will no longer be maintained for any new P2 communications.

TMCs and clients will be able to view P2 notifications in a similar format with a description of the issue, regular updates and resolution. TMCs and clients will be able to subscribe for P2 notifications via email at https://open.concur.com in a manner that is similar to that for P1 notifications.

Profile

Currently, SAP Concur solutions doesn’t enforce any validation for the NamePrefix, NameSuffix and PreferredLanguage fields via the Travel Profile v2 API. As a result, data provided or updated via the API is often nonsensical and potentially exposes personal information in those fields (e.g. user’s loginID in the prefix field.) Even though the user interface provides drop-down values for users that ensure user-entered values are valid, the Travel Profile v2 API does not.

SAP Concur will start enforcing canonical values for these three fields in two phases:

1. Targeted for April 2021, existing values that are not on the list of canonical values for these three fields will be returned to callers of the Travel Profile v2 API GET requests as empty strings.
2. Targeted for May 2021, any updates to these three fields that don’t conform to the lists of canonical values will be set as an empty string in the user’s profile, and the Travel Profile v2 API will return an error.

Reduction of risk in sharing personal data in unintended ways. More consistent user data will result in better stability and fewer escalations.

SAP Concur will remove the user profile picture functionality, including the ability to update and display the user’s picture in the My Profile - Personal Information page.

The profile picture functionality is utilised by very few SAP Concur users. Ongoing maintenance requirements have made the cost of maintaining this feature infeasible relative to the value it provides to users.

Previously, the HasNoPassport field was set automatically by Concur Travel.

• If a user had a passport in their profile, the HasNoPassport field was set to FALSE.
• If a user ticked the I do not have a passport checkbox in the Profile page, the HasNoPassport field was set to TRUE.

There was no way to set it directly via the Travel Profile v2 API.

With this change, Concur Travel will allow TMCs or partners who are permitted to read and write to the Passport Visa information scope, PASSV, to set this field directly when calling the Travel Profile v2 API.

Users who have had their passport information provided by a system (for example, their employer’s Human Resources or TMC) via the Travel Profile v2 API will have the HasNoPassport flag correctly set and correctly displayed in the User Profile UI.

The XML Profile Sync, which is used to synchronise Concur Travel user profile data with TMC partners, will no longer be available, and this is targeted for the end of 2021. We advise all partners to engage with SAP Concur representatives to adopt the Travel Profile v2 API for managing 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.