Hotel

The Concur Travel hotel search logic has been updated with an optional configuration that allows for the inclusion of all FedRooms properties within the search radius when the initial hotel availability results are presented. When enabled, the hotel availability results will continue to honour a sort order of individually configured company-preferred hotels (if any), then Most Preferred hotels, Preferred hotels, Less Preferred hotels, FedRooms, FEMA-approved and finally all others (hotels included in property-level discounts with a setting of Not Preferred and other hotels with no preference).

This enhancement is intended to be utilised by companies who have enabled the existing Prioritise GSA FedRooms® in hotel search results feature; this works in tandem with the new Return all FedRooms hotel results in the search radius before any non-preferred hotels feature and changes the user experience when hotel results are displayed.

Meetings

As part of SAP Concur’s ongoing commitment to keeping customer data secure, meeting attendees arriving from third-party registration tools will now be required to authenticate before booking in Concur Travel. This change for existing Meeting centre clients will be rolled out in waves after consultation with the customers who are impacted. For new meeting centre clients, this secure registration flow will be automatically enabled.

When the secure flow is enabled for a customer, the profiled user will be re-directed, either to their company-configured SSO provider or to the Concur Travel sign in page. Upon successful authentication, the user will be brought to the usual landing page for their meeting booking.

The Concur Third-Party Meeting Registration feature is now available in the EMEA data centre. This feature allows Concur Travel administrators and meeting planners to focus on the travel-booking configuration and negotiated fares, while leaving the integrated meeting management company to manage the invitation and registration process. The third-party registration company is also able to capture the travel itineraries for reporting purposes.

Availability of this feature in the EMEA data centre allows our EMEA meeting planners to create meetings and set up related travel policies in Concur Travel. The meeting planner experience will not change.

Miscellaneous

Targeted for 19 December, several changes will be made to Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open.

• Subscription Services: Email and RSS subscriptions for service status notifications will be 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 will be migrated to Personalised Concur Open.

• Notification Email "From" Address: The notification email address will be 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 will be published, followed by a final RCA report that contains a more complete analysis with corrective actions. Both reports will be published only in Personalised Concur Open.

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

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

This release note is intended for technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur. For our customers and suppliers participating in data exchange through various secure file transfer protocols, SAP Concur is making changes that provide greater security for those file transfers.

SAP Concur changed the IP address for st-eu.concursolutions.com from 84.14.175.233 to 46.243.56.11 on 23 November 2019.

Clients whose file transfers protocols use the SAP Concur DNS endpoint (st eu.concursolutions.com) to connect are not impacted by this change.

Clients who connect via IP address need to connect to the SAP Concur DNS endpoint (st-eu.concursolutions.com) or the new IP address.

SAP Concur recommends connecting to DNS endpoint st-eu.concursolutions.com to avoid connection issues if the SAP Concur IP address changes again in the future.

This change provides greater security for file transfers.

After a user selects a different language from the Change language list and then signs in with their credentials to SAP Concur, a page appears prompting them to confirm which language to use as it applies to the current session (for example, their latest selection or what is specified as default in their profile), or whether they want to use the latest selected language for the current session and also update the default language in their profile to that selection.

Targeted for this December release, this page will no longer appear. Instead, any language that the user selects from the Change language list will be used for the current session. To update their default language, the user can make the change under their Profile settings.

Removal of this page removes the recurrence of preferred language issues and simplifies the user experience.

Previously, delegates/proxies/assistants/arrangers who acted on behalf of others and who also had any of several administrative roles/permissions could pause their act-as session while they completed admin tasks. This feature was a benefit for the admin who might be testing configuration changes or simply who must multi-task.

Due to internal security changes, the feature has been retired.

Retiring this feature closes a potential security gap.

Travel Operations / Technical Essentials

Sabre has begun to roll out the ability to make hotel bookings 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.

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.