Cognizant, a technology services provider, and Travelport announced a partnership for a “strategic AI transformation” that will deploy Anthropic’s Claude (the company’s AI tool) to modernize the way Travelport builds, tests and maintains software across its travel retailing and distribution platforms. The collaboration, according to the announcement, aims to accelerate the delivery of AI-led innovation to airlines, hoteliers, TMCs and online travel agencies worldwide, while embedding AI features within Travelport’s platform.
According to the announcement, booking systems built for a previous era now strain to keep up. In addition, agency costs have grown as human agents increasingly piece together complex itineraries manually, and a gap has opened between how travelers now search using AI tools and what current platforms can interpret and fulfill. This collaboration, said the announcement. “will address these structural challenges through intelligent infrastructure designed to close the gap between AI-driven travel intent and a confirmed booking.”
For travel agencies and TMCs, Travelport’s platform will absorb more of the cognitive work agents currently do manually, according to the announcement, including surfacing relevant options faster, automating exchanges and rebooking, and embedding disruption intelligence into workflows. For example, an agent managing a business traveler could surface routes with statistically lower disruption risk. Travelport’s customers, said the announcement, indicate that saving even one hour per agent per day across a large TMC translates into millions of dollars in annual productivity improvement.
John Mangelaars, CEO of Travelport, said, “Anthropic brings the most capable AI models and tools; Cognizant adds engineering talent and development capability to deploy them at scale; and Travelport brings the travel infrastructure and the partner network that connects it all to the real world of distribution and bookings.”
“Anthropic also developed MCP, the protocol that lets AI agents interact directly with external systems and data,” Mangelaars added. “Choosing the organization that invented that protocol was a straightforward decision. Their approach to safety, reliability and controllability matters as much: travel is a high-trust environment where data is sensitive, and the consequences of errors are real.”
