Flight

In the July 2017 release, SAP Concur announced support for an interim solution to provide branded fare content in Apollo and Galileo for the more complex branding schemes.

This interim solution requires Concur Travel to sell and store branded fares by fare basis code, since using the common method of selling and storing by booking class/RBD could result in lower, more restrictive fares being booked when the user has specified otherwise. In many cases, the lowest brand offered by an airline does not include a checked bag or a pre-assigned seat and may not allow cancellations or changes.

Miscellaneous

On 19 December, several changes were made to Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open.

• Subscription Services: Email and RSS subscriptions for service status notifications are available only through Personalised Concur Open, which displays the service issues specific to a customer's organisation. Current Concur Open subscriptions for SAP Concur customers have been migrated to Personalised Concur Open.

• Notification Email "From" Address: The notification email address has been updated from openupdates@concur.com to ConcurOpenUpdates@sap.com. Customers should ensure that they have added the @sap.com domain to their Safe Sender List and that users have updated any personal email inbox rules.

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Reports: After each incident, a preliminary RCA report is published, followed by a final RCA report that contains a more complete analysis with corrective actions. Both reports are published only in Personalised Concur Open.

• Service Availability Status: To better reflect customer impact, the Performance Issue icon and Partial Performance Issue icon has been removed from Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open.

These changes provide better information for customers while also removing some of the information that was available to non-customers.

SAP Concur is announcing an end-of-support cycle for version 1.1 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocol, while continuing support for the more secure version 1.2 of TLS. As background, the TLS protocol allows secure back and forth communications between a phone or computer and a cloud-based service.

This change is targeted for 30 January 2020.

SAP Concur is taking this step after careful consideration of our customers’ security and ease of upgrade to the newer, more secure version 1.2 of TLS. This end-of-support plan for TLS v 1.1 ensures our clients are communicating with SAP Concur solutions in a safer and more secure manner using TLS v 1.2.

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

While this connectivity change should be seamless for end users, it does require an access-related change that will affect agency fulfilment partners (TMCs). With this change, SAP Concur will require the Host Access Profile (HAP) for the booking pseudo city code.

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

In the July 2017 release, SAP Concur announced support for an interim solution to provide branded fare content in Apollo and Galileo for the more complex branding schemes. SAP Concur was unable to extend this interim solution to Worldspan due to technical limitations.

The interim solution for complex branded fares requires some operational changes for fulfilment travel agencies, so it is a configurable feature. Due to the operational complexities, SAP Concur has limited this functionality to certain airlines.

SAP Concur has supported several options around fare storing for Worldspan. This has presented a high level of complexity for Worldspan PNR (Passenger Name Recognition) 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 has removed the Skip 4P* (USE WITH CAUTION) travel configuration setting for all Worldspan travel configurations. SAP Concur will always use 4P* (which creates a ticket record) for Worldspan PNRs that contain air segments.