Cognizant, Travelport, and Anthropic Join Forces to Innovate Travel Technology for the AI Era

Collaboration in Travel Technology

Cognizant is making significant strides in travel technology alongside Travelport, leveraging AI to innovate the industry landscape. By integrating Anthropic's Claude AI into Travelport's platforms, they are setting the compass for future travel solutions. The collaboration enhances how software is constructed, tested, and maintained across Travelport’s travel distribution and sales platforms, aiming for a revolution in AI-driven travel solutions.

The conventional booking systems have become outdated, struggling to keep pace with modern travel demands. As travel agents spend excessive hours manually assembling complex itineraries, operational costs have risen. The disconnect between AI tools that travelers utilize today and the older platforms creates gaps in fulfilling immediate travel needs. This partnership is designed to bridge these gaps through intelligent infrastructure driven by AI.

For travel agencies and Travel Management Companies (TMCs), Travelport's platform plays a crucial role in automated processes. It efficiently provides relevant options, automates rebooking, and incorporates information about disruptions like delays into workflows—tasks currently managed manually by agents. For instance, agents handling business travelers can now present statistically safe routes while effectively reducing the workload, potentially saving millions in productivity for large TMCs.

Online travel agencies face structural challenges. Although travelers increasingly turn to AI for planning, existing transaction processing systems lack the ability to interpret detailed user intentions. Travelport's MCP-based architecture transforms conversational requests from travelers into confirmed bookings, turning this capability gap into actual business opportunities.

Ravi Kumar, Cognizant’s CEO, highlights that the travel industry relies on one of the most intricate technological infrastructures worldwide, and only businesses investing in its build-out will lead advancement. This partnership offers Travelport tools for more rapid responses and scalable solutions to the evolving travel distribution environment.

Travelport CEO John Mangelaars emphasizes that AI is not a distant consideration, but a pressing reality that will define the next era of travel technology. Through collaboration with Cognizant and Anthropic, Travelport aims to harness the true potential of AI. With Anthropic providing the highest-performing AI models and Cognizant contributing the engineering expertise for large-scale deployment, Travelport connects these developments back to the core travel infrastructure and partner networks.

Mangelaars also points out that Anthropic has developed the MCP protocol enabling AI agents to communicate seamlessly with external systems and data. Partnering with a company that shares a commitment to safety, reliability, and controllability in an industry that demands high trust is crucial, considering that data privacy and error prevention are paramount in the travel sector.

This initiative is not just a limited pilot but aims to transform the large-scale development capabilities at Travelport in partnership with Cognizant and Anthropic. Initially focused on Travelport Trip Services—which handles bookings, changes, refunds, and customer service—the upgraded MCP-based interface layer will be built on Travelport's cloud-native platform and is expected to launch with early customer functionalities later this year.

Rich O'Connell, Alliance Director at Anthropic, expresses pride in partnering with Cognizant to deliver Claude to a broader audience, showcasing a milestone in modernizing one of the most intricate industries.

Cognizant is integrating Claude into its engineering platforms and delivery processes, including features powered by their Neuro® AI Multi-Agent Accelerator. Claude aids in code development, testing, and pull request reviews, analyzing Travelport's codebase with a comprehensive context window to visualize embedded business logic on a large scale.

The collaboration with Travelport reflects Cognizant's AI Builder strategy, aiming to provide industry context, end-to-end system integration, and operational oversight, enabling companies to transition from experimental AI phases to extensive production operations. As a core partner in Cognizant's global AI ecosystem, this joint initiative also broadens the strategic partnership established between Cognizant and Anthropic in November 2025.

About Cognizant

Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) serves as a bridge linking AI investments to business value, constructing full-stack AI solutions for clients. With deep expertise in industry, business process, and engineering, Cognizant enables organizations to integrate technology systems into their unique business environments, fostering human potential and delivering tangible outcomes while helping global companies stay ahead in an ever-changing world.

For more information, visit Cognizant or follow them on Twitter @cognizant.

About Travelport

Travelport is an intelligent travel infrastructure provider supporting bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers globally. Recognized as the top travel software supplier in a G2 survey from December 2025, Travelport operates in over 165 countries, with its headquarters in London, UK. For more details, visit Travelport.