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- Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic are building an AI travel ecosystem to modernize how travel technology is built, tested and maintained
- Together they are closing the critical gap in AI-driven travel: connecting systems that can reason and plan with platforms that can actually transact
TEANECK, N.J., May 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is working with Travelport on a strategic AI transformation that will deploy Anthropic’s Claude to modernize the way Travelport builds, tests and maintains software across its travel retailing and distribution platforms. The collaboration aims to accelerate the delivery of AI-led innovation to airlines, hoteliers, travel management companies and online travel agencies worldwide, while embedding AI features within Travelport’s platform.
Booking systems built for a previous era now strain to keep up: 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 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 travel management companies (TMC), Travelport’s platform will absorb more of the cognitive work agents currently do manually, 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 indicate that saving even one hour per agent per day across a large TMC translates into millions of dollars in annual productivity improvement.
For online travel agencies, the challenge is structural: travelers increasingly use AI tools to plan trips, but transactional systems cannot interpret the richness of their intent. Travelport’s MCP-based architecture will allow conversational traveler requests to translate directly into confirmed bookings with live availability, converting that capability gap into a real commercial opportunity.
“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, CEO of 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.”
“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, CEO of 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.
“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.”
This is not a limited pilot. The ambition is to work with Cognizant and Anthropic to transform how Travelport builds at scale. The initial focus is Travelport Trip Services, the platform that handles bookings, exchanges, refunds and servicing, with the MCP-based interface layer above it. The work is being built on Travelport’s cloud-native platform, with a major release imminent. The first customer-facing capabilities are expected to reach market this year.
“What Travelport aims to do with Cognizant reflects what modernization 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.
Cognizant integrates Claude within its engineering platforms and delivery processes, including Neuro-san, the open-source library behind Cognizant’s Neuro® AI multi-agent accelerator. Claude will power AI-assisted code development, test creation and pull-request review. Its large context window analyzes Travelport’s codebases and surfaces embedded business logic at scale, one of the most technically demanding elements of enterprise modernization. Together, these capabilities are expected to meaningfully reduce Travelport’s software delivery cycle times.
The work with Travelport reflects Cognizant’s AI Builder strategy: bringing industry context, end-to-end systems integration and day-to-day operational accountability to help enterprises move from AI experimentation to production at scale. Anthropic is a nodal partner within Cognizant’s global AI ecosystem, and this work extends the strategic partnership between Cognizant and Anthropic that was announced in November 2025.
About Cognizant
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) is an AI Builder and technology services provider, bridging the gap between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization’s unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, drive tangible outcomes and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at www.cognizant.ai or @cognizant.
About Travelport
Travelport is the intelligent infrastructure travel provider that powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide. Ranked First from 160 Travel Software Suppliers (G2 Survey December 2025). Headquartered in London, United Kingdom, Travelport operates in more than 165 countries. For more information, visit www.travelport.com.
For more information, contact:
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U.S. Name Ben Gorelick Email [email protected] |
Europe / APAC Name Sarah Douglas Email [email protected] |
India Name Vipin Nair Email [email protected] |
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Travelport media contact: |
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Phil Pitt |
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Travelport
