Ticketing / Airline Approval Deadlines

[DK_1]

Hello

We have travel integrated into our request workflow. When a traveller selects a fare option the airline provides a purchase-by deadline; if the deadline passes the fare is lost. Two points are causing repeated operational friction:

• Airlines often revise the initial purchase deadline, but those updates are not reflected in Concur.
• Our process requires at least two approvals before purchase, which often takes longer than short fare windows. If the fare expires before approvals are complete, the entire request is cancelled and cannot be reused, forcing travellers to recreate requests and reselect options.

Could you please advise on the following?

1. Visibility threshold - Can we prevent or hide travel options whose remaining purchase window is less than 24 hours (or make this threshold configurable), so travellers are not offered fares unlikely to be approved in time?
2. Deadline transparency - Can Concur display the estimated approval timeline or the current purchase deadline next to each fare option before selection (e.g., an “Estimated purchase cutoff: [date/time]”)? This would help travellers and approvers judge whether a fare can realistically be purchased.
3. Multiple/partial purchases - Is there a plan to support multiple travel purchases within a single request, or to allow the request to remain active if one option expires (so the rest of the request can continue)? At present, when one ticket is lost the whole request is cancelled.

Impact: This behaviour leads to lost fares, cancelled requests, rework for travellers and approvers, delays and unexpected higher cost. Ultimately, it creates frustration across the end user base, which is viewed as a Concur system issue rather than an airline issue.

[KevinD]

@DK_1 I'm asking internally to see if I can find someone to help answer your questions.

[KevinD]

@DK_1 okay, I received a response from a colleague. I have pasted exactly what she replied below. I hope this helps at least a little bit.

• Visibility threshold - Can we prevent or hide travel options whose remaining purchase window is less than 24 hours (or make this threshold configurable), so travellers are not offered fares unlikely to be approved in time?
  • I don't think so, but this is more of a travel question than a request question, as they are asking for fares to be hidden during the booking process, which takes place in Travel, not Request

• Deadline transparency - Can Concur display the estimated approval timeline or the current purchase deadline next to each fare option before selection (e.g., an “Estimated purchase cutoff: [date/time]“)? This would help travellers and approvers judge whether a fare can realistically be purchased.
  • Again I don't think so, but again more of a travel question as they are hoping to see approval deadline during the booking process, which takes place in Travel, not Request

• Multiple/partial purchases - Is there a plan to support multiple travel purchases within a single request, or to allow the request to remain active if one option expires (so the rest of the request can continue)? At present, when one ticket is lost the whole request is cancelled.
  • When a PNR is cancelled, the Request is not automatically cancelled, it is sent back to the user.  The user cannot attach a new booking to the same request, but if they had other expected expenses unrelated to the booking, they can resubmit the request still for approval of those items (in T2 integration this works, not in T1, in T1 the approval will not be able to process due to the cancelled trip)

• If they are having a lot of requests cancelled due to approvals not happening before the deadline, they could consider passive approval, which can be set up in the request policy to approve the request automatically X hours before the approval deadline.

[DK_1]

Hi Kevin, thank you for your response.

I'm not sure I quite understand the responses that refer to my queries being a "travel question". I assumed using the "travel forum" this would be the right place to pose questions related to the travel module.

The suggestion proposed concerning passive approval unfortunately is not something that is allowable in public sector institutions.

Thank you.

[arielkennedy]

Hi all,

I am very interested in this topic, as well. We are a regulated industry on the Pro version, using Concur Request as an approval first process. Then we only ticket and book reservations through Concur Travel and/or our TMC after approval is granted. I understand that our organization tried to use the workflow described above by DK_1 in a small pilot group years ago, but quickly realized that we faced the same issues with approvals not being processed quickly enough before the ticketing window expired. By agency policy, we end up usually having at least two approvers, sometimes up to four, depending on the nature of the trip. Is there a Concur configuration solution for organizations like ours to implement a Request workflow that allows for lengthy approval processing timeframes?