Travelport, Cognizant & Anthropic team up on AI bookings

Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic have formed a collaboration to modernise travel booking and servicing technology with artificial intelligence, centred on Travelport's travel retailing and distribution platform.

Cognizant will help deploy Anthropic's Claude models across Travelport's engineering operations for software development, testing and code analysis. The effort is intended to reshape how Travelport builds, tests and maintains systems used by airlines, hotels, travel management companies and online travel agencies.

The agreement targets a long-running problem in travel technology. Consumers are increasingly using AI tools to research and plan trips, while many booking systems still struggle to interpret complex requests and turn them into confirmed bookings in real time.

That mismatch has also increased pressure on agency operations. Human agents often have to assemble more complicated itineraries manually while handling exchanges, refunds and disruption management across systems built for an earlier generation of travel retailing.

Operational focus

The initial focus is Travelport Trip Services, the platform that handles bookings, exchanges, refunds and servicing. An MCP-based interface layer will sit above it, built on Travelport's cloud-native platform.

For travel management companies and agencies, the aim is to shift more manual work from agents into software workflows. That includes surfacing relevant options more quickly, automating exchanges and rebooking, and adding disruption data into the booking process.

For online travel agencies, the project addresses the gap between conversational trip planning and transaction systems. The architecture is designed to translate traveller requests made through AI tools into bookings linked to live availability.

Cognizant said Claude will be integrated into its engineering platforms and delivery processes, including Neuro-san, the open-source library behind Cognizant's Neuro AI multi-agent accelerator. The model will be used for AI-assisted code development, test creation and pull-request review, with particular emphasis on analysing large, complex codebases.

The companies said this could shorten software delivery cycles at Travelport. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Industry pressure

The deal comes as travel groups face rising expectations from customers who are becoming more comfortable using generative AI to search, compare and plan trips. That shift is pushing travel technology providers to update the infrastructure behind booking, fulfilment and servicing rather than confining AI to front-end chat tools.

Travelport said customer feedback suggests that even modest time savings in agency workflows can have a material commercial effect for larger travel management companies. In its view, reducing agent workload by one hour a day can translate into millions of dollars in annual productivity gains.

Ravi Kumar S set out Cognizant's view of the project.

"The travel industry runs on some of the most complex technology infrastructure in the world, and the companies that will lead it forward are the ones investing now in how that infrastructure gets built," said Ravi Kumar S, Chief Executive Officer, Cognizant. "This collaboration is about giving Travelport the tools to move faster and deliver higher quality at scale to meet the challenge of a changing travel distribution landscape. That's what the AI Builder model is designed to do."

John Mangelaars described the partnership as part of a wider shift in the sector.

"AI is not a future consideration, it is happening now, and the companies that move fastest and most intelligently will define the next era of travel technology," said John Mangelaars, Chief Executive Officer, Travelport. "Collaborating with Cognizant and Anthropic gives us a genuine AI superpower. 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."

Mangelaars also pointed to the choice of Anthropic for protocol and governance reasons.

"Anthropic also developed MCP, the protocol that lets AI agents interact directly with external systems and data," said Mangelaars. "Choosing the organisation that invented that protocol was a straightforward decision. Their approach to safety, reliability and controllability matters just as much: travel is a high-trust environment where data is sensitive and the consequences of errors are real."

The arrangement also extends an existing strategic partnership between Cognizant and Anthropic. Anthropic is being positioned as one of the model providers in Cognizant's wider AI ecosystem, while Travelport is using the tie-up to change how its engineering teams handle a large codebase and business logic spread across its travel systems.

Rich O'Connell highlighted the technical demands of that work.

"What Travelport aims to do with Cognizant reflects what modernisation can look like in a complex industry. Reasoning across large, complex codebases is where Claude is at its best - and that's exactly what travel infrastructure demands. We're proud to support Cognizant as a trusted partner in bringing Claude to more enterprises," said Rich O'Connell, Head of Alliances, Anthropic.