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- Travelport, Cognizant, and Anthropic are building an AI travel ecosystem to modernize how travel technology is built, tested, and maintained.
- The three-way collaboration aims to bridge a critical gap in AI-driven travel: connecting systems capable of reasoning and planning with platforms that can actually execute transactions.
TEANECK, N.J.May 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is partnering with Travelport on a strategic AI transformation initiative, deploying Anthropic’s Claude to modernize how software is built, tested, and maintained on Travelport’s travel retail and distribution platform. This collaboration aims to accelerate AI-led innovation for global airlines, hoteliers, travel management companies, and online travel agencies, while embedding AI capabilities into Travelport’s platform.
Booking systems built for a previous era are struggling to keep pace: human agents are increasingly piecing together complex itineraries manually, driving up agency costs, while a gap has emerged between how travelers now search using AI tools and what current platforms can interpret and fulfill. This partnership will address these structural challenges through intelligent infrastructure, aiming to bridge the divide between AI-driven travel intent and confirmed bookings.
For travel agencies and travel management companies (TMCs), the Travelport platform will take on more of the cognitive work currently done manually by human agents, including presenting relevant options faster, automating changes and rebookings, and embedding disruption alerts into workflows. For example, agents managing business travelers could statistically recommend routes with lower disruption risk. Travelport’s clients indicate that even saving one hour per agent per day in a large TMC can translate into millions of dollars in annual productivity gains.
For online travel agencies, a structural challenge exists: travelers increasingly use AI tools to plan trips, but transaction systems cannot interpret the richness of their intent. Travelport’s MCP-based architecture can convert travelers’ conversational requests directly into confirmed bookings with real-time availability feedback, turning this capability gap into a genuine business opportunity.
Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant, said: “The travel industry runs on some of the most complex technology infrastructure in the world, and the companies that will lead are those building that infrastructure now. This partnership is about giving Travelport the tools to move faster and deliver at higher quality at scale, to meet the challenges of a shifting travel distribution landscape. That’s what the AI builder model was designed to do.”
John Mangelaars, CEO of Travelport, said: “AI is not a future consideration—it’s happening now, and the fastest, smartest movers will define the next era of travel technology. Partnering with Cognizant and Anthropic gives us true AI superpowers. Anthropic brings the most powerful AI models and tools; Cognizant brings the engineering talent and development capability to deploy them at scale; and Travelport provides the travel infrastructure and partner network to connect it all to real-world distribution and booking scenarios.”
Mangelaars added: “Anthropic also developed MCP, a protocol that allows AI agents to interact directly with external systems and data. Choosing the inventor of that protocol was a natural decision. Their philosophy around safety, reliability, and controllability is equally critical: travel is a high-trust domain with sensitive data, and mistakes have real consequences.”
This is not a phased pilot project. The goal is to fundamentally change how Travelport builds at scale, in partnership with Cognizant and Anthropic. Initial focus is on Travelport Trip Services, the platform responsible for bookings, changes, refunds, and related services, with an MCP-based interface layer built on top. This work is underway on Travelport’s cloud-native platform, with a major release imminent. The first customer-facing features are expected to hit the market this year.
Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances at Anthropic, said: “Travelport and Cognizant’s collaboration goals reflect what modernization can look like in a complex industry. Reasoning over large, complex codebases is where Claude excels—and that’s exactly what travel infrastructure requires. We’re honored to support Cognizant as a trusted partner in bringing Claude to more enterprises.”
Cognizant is integrating Claude into its engineering platforms and delivery processes, including Neuro-san, the open-source library behind Cognizant’s Neuro® AI multi-agent accelerator. Claude will drive AI-assisted code development, test creation, and pull request reviews. Its large context window can analyze Travelport’s codebase and extract embedded business logic at scale—one of the most technically demanding aspects of enterprise modernization. Combined, these capabilities are expected to significantly shorten Travelport’s software delivery cycles.
The partnership with Travelport reflects Cognizant’s AI builder strategy: combining industry context, end-to-end system integration, and operational responsibility to help enterprises move from AI experimentation to production at scale. Anthropic is a core partner in Cognizant’s global AI ecosystem, and this collaboration extends the strategic partnership between Cognizant and Anthropic announced in November 2025.
About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is an AI builder and technology services provider dedicated to bridging the gap between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for clients. With deep industry, process, and engineering expertise, we integrate unique business scenarios with technical systems to unlock human potential, deliver tangible returns, and help global enterprises stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. Visit www.cognizant.ai or follow us on social media @cognizant for more information.
About Travelport
Travelport is an intelligent infrastructure travel provider, powering booking technology for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide. Travelport ranks #1 among 160 travel software vendors (G2 December 2025 survey). Headquartered in London, UK, Travelport operates in over 165 countries and territories. For more information, visit www.travelport.com.
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