5.6 Release Notes

Released 04 July 2021

Release Highlights

Government Travel Advisory - Safe Travel (NZ)

The importance of having accurate and timely delivered country-level Government travel advice for New Zealand has always been of high importance for Kudos.

Unfortunately, the existing RSS feed consumed became substandard with risk-level and revision date/time stamps being unavailable or becoming outdated for reasons beyond our control.

Kudos is pleased to relaunch MFAT’s Safe Travel advisory service to allow any agency, especially one based in New Zealand to utilise this Government's travel advice.

Travel Advisory is available to be set at Travel Office and Agency levels.

Kudos recommends setting at the agency level, as this allows a single setup to be inherited by all associated travel offices and companies, as shown in the following example.

Once the government’s travel advisory has been enabled, it will be available in Request, Trips and Care. The Dashboard also provides a snapshot of the level four (4) and five (5) advice ratings. Our travel advice country maps in the 5.5 Release will be presented, should the New Zealand Government not provide its own map for a country.

Request

Trips

Care

Dashboard

Kudos Country Advice Mapping

The following table is intended to provide insights into Kudos' mapping (translation) of the advice ratings for the New Zealand Government travel advisory service.

New Language - Spanish

Kudos is pleased to expand its platform’s language diversity, with support for Spanish (Español).

This addition brings the total number of supported languages in the travel platform to nine (9).

	English United Kingdom		Japanese 日本語
	Korean 한국어		French français
	Chinese 中文		Thai ภาษา
	Russian русский		Māori te reo
	España español		Deutschland Deutsch COMING

User Language Selector

A user can set their own language preference of Spanish, if not already the default^~, via the Language switcher option located in the bottom right of the platform’s Dashboard.

^~Default locale (language) is defined by the agency’s Kudos Administration user(s) at the Agency or Travel Office profile (level). ⚠ If none is set, English (United Kingdom) will be used.

Currency Localisation

This enhancement is designed to ensure a consistent display of global currencies in the platform. Default Currency is available to be set at Travel Office and Agency levels.

If no default currency is set at the travel office level, the agency’s will be used.

Request

Credits

A Credits total (count) value will be shown where more than one (1) currency code is present in the registered e.g. AUD and NZD, as shown in the following example.

Widgets (Traveller Tracker) - Map Centring

The Traveller Tracking widget’s map centring has been enhanced to now determine a focus based on the Country setting of the Travel Office.

Companies, their users (e.g. traveller), as well as agency users (i.e. TAM) inherit the map centring based on the Country of the travel office they are associated with.

Country	Widget Map Centring
United Kingdom
Mexico

Trips - Confidential & Suppression

This enhancement allows an agency to define certain Trips (e.g. PNRs) in the Trips and Care UIs to be identified as Confidential as well as removed (suppressed).

• A Confidential Trip will only be visible to the traveller within their platform access.

• A Suppressed Trip will not be visible to any platform user, including the traveller.

Confidential

The following outlines the requirements to allow a PNR to be identified as Confidential.

• A PNR to be marked as Confidential must contain the required Remark e.g. RM*CONFIDENTIAL:YES

  • Any PNR not containing this element or RM*CONFIDENTIAL:NO (for example) is presumed to not be confidential.

• A PNR marked as Confidential required to be viewed by all within the platform must have the Confidential Remark removed or updated to indicate “no” e.g. RM*CONFIDENTIAL:NO.

  • Once PNR updates are complete, a revised data file (IMR) must be sent to Amadeus Link. This can be triggered using the BT command.

Amadeus

• Setup of a Confidential Remark in BMP Link, as shown in the following example. Once set and active, all PNRs processed and reprocessed from that date forward will inherit the change.

Suppression

A Trip that is required to be removed (suppressed) from the platform for all users, including the traveller, should be added to the agency’s Suppression table (list). This feature will be available to Kudos Administration user(s) only.

• A trip added to the Suppression table will not be viewable within the platform.

• A trip removed from the Suppression table will be viewable once again within the platform.

Widgets (Upcoming Trips)

The Refresh icon in the 5.5 Release for the Upcoming Trips widget has been enhanced to ensure the updated view (cached data) is retained.

• Previously while the widget’s view (data) was updated, it was not stored (cached). As a result, a user navigating to another part of the platform was required to refresh the widget again upon their return to the dashboard.

Passport OCR - Nationality

Kudos' Passport Photo upload option using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been updated for the Nationality field extracted from the passport’s Machine Readable Zone (MRZ).

• German nationality of a 1-alpha “D” is now accepted as per ICAO’s Machine Readable Passports specifications.

  • It will be translated to ISO country code “DEU” when passport information is to be provided to airlines (i.e. SSR DOCS).

• If an issue is encountered with identifying the passport’s nationality, a validation error is now presented on the passport preview page.

A passport nationally validation error will be unable to select the Save option. Instead, selection of Cancel is required and the user can attempt to upload the passport photo image again or enter the information manually.