Flight

With this release, SAP Concur will retire the Flight Status tab from the Travel Wizard. The Flight Status tab is not providing the information that customers need. Generally, users find that airline or flight tracker websites are a better resource for flight information. For those who have TripIt Pro, it offers a premier flight tracking service that alerts the user when a change occurs.

SAP Concur has delivered support for branded fares on Amadeus using Airline Fare Families as of the June 2017 release. SAP Concur has completed development to extend this support to flex faring, and enabled this functionality on the evening of 23 April.

Office ID (OID) setting changes are required to support the volume of fares returned for flex faring shopping. Amadeus is in the process of completing those OID changes for all Concur Travel Amadeus customers now; the feature will be enabled once that work is complete.

Web Fares

This enhancement was made available late after the last release. This information is repeated here as a reminder.

The support of AMEX BTA / I-BTA via Travelfusion has been a requested enhancement from many of our clients. The American Express Business Travel Account (BTA) is a centralised billing product that consolidates employee business travel expenses into a single account. AMEX I-BTA (Invoice Business Travel Account) is a special version of BTA that allows VAT reclaim for the German market.

As of now, Concur Travel supports AMEX BTA / I-BTA descriptive data deliveryfor all flights booked via Travelfusion.

Miscellaneous

For customers who currently display the Privacy Agreement page to users, be aware that – with this release – SAP Concur will eliminate that page. That means the existing Privacy Agreement page will no longer display under any circumstances. With that, the options to customise the privacy agreement text and to apply policy (for example, to require that a user accept the privacy agreement) will be removed.

Also with this release, SAP Concur will provide a standard privacy statement, which can be accessed via a link in the page footer. The new SAP Concur Privacy Statement describes SAP Concur's responsibility as a "processor" of customer data. The new SAP Concur Privacy Statement text is available here:

https://www.concur.com/en-us/processor-privacy-statement (English Only)

With increased attention to security and data privacy, we determined a change in the Guest Travel (non-profiled user) feature as well as when booking multiple passengers was warranted. We will no longer support a previous guest lookup and store data about the non-employee or previous companion. When making a guest or multiple passenger reservation, the data will need to be added manually (or in the case of multi-passenger, the option to look up an employee).

SAP Concur has a new feature, Data Retention, that allows clients to control how long the Concur solution stores their data based on who, when and where criteria. A new shared role, Data Retention Administrator, has been created in the system and is required for accessing this feature.

The feature provides the following functionality:

• Allows a company to set a specific amount of calendar time after which data such as old user profiles, itineraries and expense claims will be removed.

• Provides strict access to policy configuration with an email notification.

• Includes the ability to place a hold on a specific user whose data will be excluded by this feature when it is necessary or desirable to retain older data.

• Includes the ability to remove the data of a specific user independent of the company-wide data retention configuration.

• Provides a high-level summary of events to monitor data retention activities.

Over the past few months, SAP Concur has been taking steps to automatically remove or mask personally identifiable or sensitive data, with the goal of keeping user data secure. In keeping with that goal – with this release – SAP Concur will remove "companion" data (such as user details, loyalty numbers and TSA precheck numbers) that has not been used for longer than 100 days.

Note the following:

• Be aware that this action is limited to data collected about companions during booking. It does not affect the underlying travel itinerary or expense claim data for those users.

• This change will occur in May but not necessarily on the day of the May release.

For the past few months, there have been release notes about users being able to opt out of in-product messaging (IPM).

Just to clarify:

• For customers deployed to the EMEA Data Centre, users were provided with the ability to opt out late last year.

• For customers deployed to the North America Data Centre, users will be provided the ability to opt out in stages, with SAP Concur planning to have this feature fully available by the end of April.

SAP Concur is updating our employee's outgoing email to use sap.com instead of concur.com email addresses. This means clients will receive email communications from both domains. Clients may want to contact their IT department to add "sap.com" to their email whitelist.

Communications sent to SAP Concur using the concur.com email addresses will continue to be supported, including:

• plans@concur.com

• receipts@concur.com

• and all other existing concur.com email addresses

Planned Innovations/Changes

The items in this section are targeted for future releases. Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.

Concur delivered a new UI for branded fares in 2016 and further enhanced in 2017, both in UI and with expanded branded fares coverage. With an upcoming release, we will move to utilise our new branded fare data store to populate all branded fare information. These changes apply to search by price and flex faring views. In addition, we will provide more brand detail in the Fare Details section, such as: Wi-Fi availability, food and drink, changes, mileage, standby and priority.

In a future release, Concur will announce support for Airbnb.com as a new Hotel Service supplier. Airbnb is the world’s largest community accommodation marketplace with over 3,000,000 listings in 65,000 cities and 191 countries.

Concur has upgraded its hotel connectivity technology to offer a new API service known as HotelService 2.0 or HS2. The new API is designed as a standard solution for all hotel suppliers connected to Concur Travel. Throughout the next months, we are planning to migrate all hotel direct connect partner APIs from the existing legacy APIs (HotelService 1.0, HRS and Hotel.de) to our new microservice-based HotelService API 2.0. The first hotel supplier we plan to migrate to our new API is HRS in the month of May or June.

Concur Travel currently provides rail content for US, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden. Concur will add content for Italy (Trenitalia) to the portfolio of Concur Travel rail carriers via the existing SilverRail integration.

Currently individual or ghost cards are supported for SilverRail bookings, with SilverRail being the merchant of records. In order to provide the option for the TMC to be the merchant of records, Concur will implement the "On Account" payment feature within Concur Travel. It allows TMCs to extend credit agreements with customers that enjoy this arrangement with other modes of transport.

Trainline started supporting a new Ticket Delivery type – mTickets – which allows users to download the ticket directly on their Trainline mobile app.

mTickets can be downloaded on iOS (9.0 operating system and newer) and Android (4.1 operation system and newer). The Trainline mTickets are currently accepted by Virgin Trains West Coast, Virgin Trains East Coast, CrossCountry Trains, Greater Anglia, Northern Rail, First TransPennine Express, Heathrow Express and Great Western Railways.

For the current list of accepted routes, please visit: http://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4208 (English Only)

Targeted for the end of 2018, XML Profile Sync will no longer be available. SAP Concur recommends that all customers using XML Profile Sync move to Travel Profile API 2.0 at their earliest convenience. Version 2.0 functionality has been in production since May 2015 and affords better security and data validation that will support TMCs in meeting the needs of their travellers.

If TMCs need assistance in identifying their customers who are still using XML Profile Sync, SAP Concur will assist with the identification of those customers.

SAP Concur evaluated all reports that are available from within Concur Travel. The goal of the evaluation was to balance the need to meet strict data security requirements, customer usage of these reports, the availability of travel data elsewhere and the resources required to maintain the reports.

SAP Concur has identified the following Travel Reports (listed below) that will be retired, with a planned retirement date in October 2018. Refer to the release notes (link at the end of this document) for additional information and a complete list or reports.

Targeted for the June 2018 release, due to increased concerns around security, the Access Code field will be required when creating or editing a meeting. Planners must provide an Access Code in the Meeting Admin page and configure the third-party meeting management product accordingly.

SAP Concur announced the End of Support for plain text FTP to transfer data to and from SAP Concur.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 1 September, 2018, SAP Concur Operations will apply a security update to our File Transfer infrastructure, restricting the use of plain text FTP as a part of our ongoing commitment to securing our customers’ data and meeting the audited security requirements of the SAP Concur Trust Platform.

Client Notifications

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors (English only)

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition