Administration

The Air Upgrades feature within Concur Travel has been sunset with this release. This process is no longer reliant on a GDS command. The airlines now have automated processes based on the user’s loyalty status.

As announced with the June 2017 release, Concur has invested in new e-receipt technology that will allow Concur’s partners to deliver richer, higher quality receipts than is currently possible. This is an important step in the fulfilment of our vision of the effortless expense claim. To deliver the best user experience, e-receipts are now only available for customers who have Concur Expense.

The Social Networking feature within Concur Travel has been sunset with this release. With the increased focus on security and the fact that this feature is used by less than 5% of our customers, we decided to remove it.

Flight

In the July 2017 release, Concur announced support for an interim solution to provide branded fare content in Apollo and Galileo for the more “complex” branding schemes. For more information, refer to the release notes.

As noted in the July 2017 release notes for Amadeus: Support Branded Fares using Airline Fare Families, initial branded fares functionality works in a slightly different manner than the previously supported branded fares features (for Sabre and Travelport). With this release, Concur has made the user experience consistent with the established Sabre and Travelport features.

Business Purpose: This change provides a consistent branded fares user experience for customers across all GDS reservation systems. It also more clearly denotes to the user that additional fares are available for their flight selection.

Web Fares

PartnerPlusBenefit (PPB) is the free bonus programme of the Lufthansa Group Airlines for medium-sized businesses. To collect BenefitPoints, clients can now store their PartnerPlusBenefit number for Eurowings in the Travelfusion B2B Credentials section so that the PPB number will be automatically sent to Eurowings with each booking.

Business Purpose: With PartnerPlusBenefit, medium-sized companies can earn BenefitPoints on business flights to get awards. The PPB number will now automatically be sent to Eurowings so that BenefitPoints can be collected for each booking.

Train

During 2016, Concur improved the user experience for SNCF multi-passenger bookings. The Companion page, which is displayed before the search, gives travel arrangers the opportunity to specify the companion information for the selected trips, including any discount cards that may be applicable for those travellers. This process results in having a multi-passenger booking that may include different fare types for each passenger, depending on their discount cards. With this release, we improved the display to ensure that the exact fare name and fare rule information is easily identifiable for each passenger.

Business Purpose: Travel arrangers booking SNCF trips for multiple passengers will be able to clearly identify the applicable fare name and fare rules for each traveller.

For Renfe and Swedish Rail, Concur delivered the basic features and will continue to add additional functionality in order to meet all market requirements. In the first release iteration, passive segments were not supported. To ensure that TMCs are able to view client rail bookings, with this release, Concur will support passive segments for Sabre.

Business Purpose: SilverRail bookings will be visible for TMCs to they can provide reporting and duty of care.

For Renfe and Swedish Rail, Concur delivered the basic features and will continue to add additional functionality in order to meet all market requirements. In the first release iteration, passive segments were not supported. To ensure that TMCs are able to view client rail bookings, with this release, Concur will support passive segments starting with Amadeus, the primary GDS in Spain and Sweden.

Business Purpose: SilverRail bookings will be visible for TMCs to they can provide reporting and duty of care.

Miscellaneous

Concur Travel has partnered with Conferma, a technology provider that works with banks and travel suppliers, to issue virtual cards for use with their network of travel suppliers across 184 countries.

Concur Travel will generate a one-time credit card number for a specified amount (including a CVV number, if necessary) and will pass that card number to the hotel supplier. In addition, the hotel will be faxed with the card information, thus securing a direct bill for that hotel reservation.

With this release, images on the sign-in page will be updated to a new quarterly selection of images.

New images: New York (USA), Istanbul (Turkey), Melbourne (Australia), Philadelphia (USA), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Milan (Italy) and Dallas (USA)

The Users by Browser report is available to all admins working with the Expense, Request, Invoice and/or Travel offerings in both the Professional and Standard product editions. With this release, the report is available only in CSV format.

Business Purpose: The report shows admins if users have outdated or unsupported browsers. CSV is the most widely used data format.

In the past, AirPlus A.I.D.A. cards have been generated for rental car bookings if AirPlus was not accepted by the rental car supplier. We have received feedback from rental car suppliers that virtual credit cards are not accepted for rental car reservations. Based on this information, we have disabled AirPlus A.I.D.A. card generation for rental car bookings in Concur Travel to ensure that virtual credit cards are no longer used as guarantee/payment for rental car bookings.

Business Purpose: Accurate handling of AirPlus guarantee/payment process is ensured for rental car reservations.

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 is dedicated to protecting our customers from potential security issues. One area that requires updates is self-registration. Concur will remove the ability to allow users to set passwords at registration for the self-registration pages. In addition, going forward, Concur will always require approval for new self-registrations. By removing the ability to set passwords and by forcing approval, Concur will help protect customers and their data.

As announced last year, Concur plans to offer unique capabilities to our mutual customers using Compleat. The first step in this process is to identify the mutual Compleat and Concur Travel customers. When the PNR is populated with the configuration ID, Concur will be able to identify itineraries that will then be able to take advantage of new capabilities. The second phase will be to begin delivering the new capabilities. For more information, refer to this month's release notes.

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.

Trenitalia is the primary rail passenger carrier in Italy, formed in the year 2000. With Trenitalia services, users can travel almost anywhere in Italy. Trenitalia offers high-speed train services via classic intercity trains as well as regional trains.

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

Concur will discontinue Concur Meeting on 1 January 2018.

Concur will make adjustments to the XML Profile Sync so that it is more scalable as TMCs move from XML Profile Sync to Travel Profile API 2.0. Most of these changes involve rare cases, for example, where Concur receives unexpected data, such as alpha characters for numeric fields. As these adjustments occur, Concur will provide complete details in the release notes.

Recently, we stated that the accessibility feature will no longer be optional and that the feature will be defaulted to ON for all Concur sites. This change has been delayed. Additional details will be provided later.

With the September release, we are announcing support for virtual payment for GDS hotels through our partnership with Conferma. With this release, Concur will pass the following information (if populated) for each virtual card request: Employee ID, Cost Centre, Org Unit and Department.

With the October release, full Data Field Mapping customisation will be available. Concur will continue to pass the four elements until the November release to allow customers who launch in September time to configure their mapping. After the November release, the only data sent to Conferma will be that which is set up in Virtual Payment Admin.

For quite some time, In-Product Messaging (IPM) within Concur products has been available for US customers. Early Access customers in the EU will be contacted by a Concur representative before enabling this feature. After 60 days, this feature could be enabled for all other customers in the EU. Also, since the new system will provide a better all-around IPM experience for Concur customers, US customers will soon use the new system, too.

Just like today for US users – the content, timing, location and frequency of a message are all defined by each message campaign and by the characteristics of each company and each user.

Client Notifications

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

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