Authorised Support Contacts

SAP Concur solutions has added an option to the SAP Concur support portal that enables Authorised Support Contacts (ASCs) to designate whether they should be contacted regarding a security or data protection topic.

This enhancement gives clients more control over who in their company is contacted regarding security or data protection topics, and provides greater control over which notifications an ASC receives.

Flight

Recently, Southwest Airlines made a change to their distribution strategy and has released Southwest Airlines content in both the Travelport and Amadeus GDS environments. Southwest Airlines has also chosen to retire the BBR (Basic Booking Request) connection that was solely available in Sabre for several years. In order to accommodate customers with multi-GDS environments, Concur Travel has improved support of alternate GDS connections to facilitate Southwest content.

This change will provide an improved customer experience.

For companies that participate in the American Airlines AirPass programme, Concur Travel will soon support American Airlines’ next generation AirPass programme. This programme allows travellers to purchase unrestricted airfares at a pre-paid fixed rate.

There are several differences between the new and legacy AirPass programmes, but these differences are generally operational in nature. These changes allow Concur Travel to offer a more streamlined booking and fulfilment experience for AirPass fares.

Hotel

Targeted for Monday, 7 December, SAP Concur Travel will update Booking.com from using Hotel Service v1 to Hotel Service v2. Booking.com content will only be available on the web; it will not be available on mobile.

Travellers configured to see Booking.com content will be able to shop, book and cancel hotels provided by Booking.com through Hotel Service v2, available for all markets. Travellers will see improvements in viewing a unique set of hotels supported by the process of merging rates from GDS and Direct Connect under the same property. Hotel details and image galleries are present when hotels are sourced by Booking.com, where those features were not available via Hotel Service v1.

Profile

In response to a recommended security change, SAP Concur solutions is changing the way the Profile page UI behaves in with respect to Save button functionality. Previously, after successfully saving information, the user would remain on the Profile page. After this modification, when the user clicks Save, they are redirected back to the Profile Options page.

This behaviour is consistent with what the User Administrator sees when making changes on the user’s Profile in the Administer Users section. On clicking any of the Save buttons in the user’s Profile page, the Administrator is redirected back to the User Administration page.

This change provides better protection of users’ data.

The current supported version of the Travel Profile API is version 2.0. However, there are still clients and partners who continue to call the Travel Profile 1.0 API/Profile endpoint to get user profiles. This old endpoint will be fully deprecated with the December 2020 release; users must switch to Travel Profile 2.0 API before this date.

By reducing the number of supported mechanisms for exchanging profile data, SAP Concur solutions is able to focus on providing better security, ease-of-use and additional functionality for those we support.

SAP Concur solutions is adding an optional parameter into the Travel Profile 2.0 (TP2.0) API / Get Summary endpoint that allows callers to retrieve users associated with one or more Travel Configurations.

This enhancement will enable Travel Profile 2.0 callers to filter the set of user profiles to a smaller set, potentially reducing the amount of time, bandwidth and resources need to sync profiles with CTE.

Miscellaneous

Starting with the January 2021 release, SAP Concur Technical Publications will no longer publish the preview release notes. This change is being made to streamline our client communication. With this change, only two sets of release notes will be published for each monthly release cycle: draft release notes and final release notes.

This change simplifies the release notes communications.

In early October, the SAP Concur networking team noted that their configuration of the Content Delivery System had been blocking the protocols in the list that follows for some time.

As such, the notice to customers that we would be making a change to our F5 Client SSL profile was superfluous, as those aspects of the existing profile were not actually available. SAP Concur made changes to the F5 Client SSL profile on 7 October as well, in the interest of maintaining a strong security profile.

This update provides ongoing security for our products and services.

Support for the Director SAML service is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel will soon begin assisting customers who currently use Director SAML to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

Clients currently using Director SAML are encouraged to migrate to SAML V2 as soon as possible.

This change provides better security and improved support for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

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 set up 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 solutions will begin 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.

SAP Concur solutions is removing the optional query parameter “includePersonalTrips” from the GET call of the Travel Trip v1.1 API that allows users to retrieve a list of trips.

Before this change, Travel Trip v1.1 GET API callers were able to retrieve personal trips in Concur Travel using this query parameter. This is no longer supported. Other query parameters are, however, still supported.

This enhancement will enable Travel Trip v1.1 GET callers to retrieve only business trips in CTE.

Instances of Country or Countries on the user interface are being updated to Country/Region and Countries/Regions, respectively.

This change provides a better global user experience.

Flight

**Planned Changes** CIBT – Retirement of Legacy Integration

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 is planned for the second half of 2021. More details will be provided closer to the retirement date.

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.