As previously communicated, the new Concur travel experience (T2) is slated to go live with SAP Concur on October 17, 2023.
Acendas Travel actions
While we are excited for the much-anticipated roll-out of T2, we have made the decision to temporarily disable the auto-on feature for all Acendas clients, due to significant limitations of the new T2 experience and the impact to our travelers, as communicated by Concur.
If you have questions, please reach out to your Acendas Travel program manager.
The New Concur Travel Experience applies only to eligible Sabre Travel Configurations designated with USD currency. Initially, availability will only be for select customers identified by Concur, Eligibility is based on settings and features enabled per Travel Configuration.
Eligibility is per vertical (air, car and hotel). In some cases, customers may only be eligible for 1 or 2 verticals resulting in a mixed experience. For example, air might be booked in the current experience, car in the new experience, and hotel in the current experience.
Each customer will need to decide which eligible vertical they want to Opt-In to. Customers with more than one Sabre Travel Configuration designated with USD currency could have a different eligibility status per configuration. This could mean users on different Travel Configurations will have a different experience.
What are the limitations?
As with any modern technology development process, there are features which Concur is continuing to work on and which therefore won’t be included. Some features that exclude Travel Configurations from the New Experience:
- Choose Your Rule Class across all Travel Configurations
- Hotel Per Diems
- Virtual Payment via Conferma Pay
- Integrated Concur Request
- Southwest Direct Connect
- Concur Standard
Some features that are not yet available in the new Experience, but do not disqualify Travel Configurations.
- Search by Schedule Option Discontinued
- Share and Clone Trip Feature Discontinued
- Flight Matrix Discontinued
- Pre and Post Ticket Changes
- Users cannot change trips. Trip would need to be cancelled and rebooked
- Place Trips on Hold
Some features are not yet available and will automatically redirect users back to the current Concur Travel experience, meaning they may start from the T2 experience and then be redirected to the legacy experience, booking through two different experiences:
- Multi-city air search
- Guest booking
- Third party meeting integrated booking
This is not an exhaustive list. There are additional limitations and product updates are on-going. For more details on the above functionalities, and future releases, please refer to Concur’s latest release notes and the New Experience Feature Exclusions Limitations and Changed Behavior document.
What is Acendas Travel’s overall approach for enablement?
There are several ways for eligible customers to migrate. Each comes with different impacts and levels of effort on all sides. Having assessed the benefits/disadvantages of each, we now understand current functionality gaps and have made the decision to take a controlled go-live approach. This means we will Opt-Out all Acendas Travel customers prior to Concur’s automatic go live on October 17, 2023.