Cognizant has announced a strategic collaboration with Travelport and Anthropic to modernise travel technology infrastructure using AI.
The partnership will see Cognizant deploy Anthropic’s Claude models across Travelport’s travel retailing and distribution platforms to improve how software is built, tested and maintained. The companies said the collaboration aims to bridge the growing gap between AI-powered travel planning tools and traditional booking systems that often struggle to process complex traveller requests.
According to the companies, the move is expected to help airlines, hoteliers, travel management companies and online travel agencies automate several manual tasks currently handled by human agents. These include itinerary management, ticket exchanges, refunds, rebookings and disruption handling.
“The travel industry runs on some of the most complex technology infrastructure in the world. 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,” said Ravi Kumar S, CEO at Cognizant.
John Mangelaars, CEO of Travelport, said AI is already reshaping the future of the travel sector. He added that collaborating with Cognizant and Anthropic gives them a genuine AI superpower.
The companies said the initiative will initially focus on Travelport Trip Services, the platform responsible for bookings, exchanges and servicing operations. The system will also use Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) which allows AI agents to interact directly with external systems and live travel data.
“Claude’s large-context reasoning abilities make it suitable for handling 'large, complex codebases' common in travel infrastructure systems”, added Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances, Anthropic.
Cognizant stated that Claude will also power AI-assisted software development, automated test creation and pull-request reviews through its Neuro AI multi-agent accelerator platform. The company expects these capabilities to significantly reduce Travelport’s software delivery cycle times.
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