Before you can use Travel Planning fully, a number of internal R/3 and external prerequisites or settings must be fulfilled.

The online booking function in Travel Planning is based on the cooperation with external reservation systems that are used to communicate with the service providers. The R/3 user has access to the following functions via the connection to an external reservation system:

• Availability query of travel services
• Transfer of additional information about selected travel services
• Price information
• Processing of reservation by the respective provider
• Synchronization of the data in SAP Travel Planning if external booking changes have been made

In the current release the external reservation systems in use are Amadeus and Sabre.

To use one of the reservation systems your enterprise must have signed an agreement to use the corresponding system and be registered with the reservation system via a user ID. In addition to this, a network connection to the relevant reservation system must have been opened.

You make the settings for the connection to a reservation system in Customizing. You find this in the Implementation Guide (IMG) under Accounting ® Travel Management ® Travel Planning ® Master Data ® Travel Planning Control Parameters. Refer to the documentation for the individual IMG activities for further information.

R/3 users can only use Travel Planning to book trips for themselves of for others if they have the appropriate authorization.

In order to plan and book a trip for a traveler using Travel Planning, you must have maintained a trip-specific mini master record with personnel number in the R/3 System.