Travelport, Cognizant, and Anthropic Collaborate to Advance AI-Driven Travel Technology

## Travelport, Cognizant, and Anthropic Collaborate to Advance AI-Driven Travel Technology

Cognizant (CEO: Ravi Kumar, HQ: New Jersey, USA) is engaging in a strategic AI transformation with Travelport to modernize the way software is built, tested, and maintained across Travelport's travel distribution platform by integrating Anthropic's Claude. This collaboration aims to provide AI-driven innovations to airlines, hotels, travel management companies (TMCs), and online travel agencies (OTAs) worldwide more rapidly by embedding AI capabilities directly into Travelport's platform.

Legacy booking systems are increasingly struggling to keep up. As human agents manually assemble complex itineraries, agency costs rise, creating a gap between how travelers search using AI tools and what current platforms can interpret and execute. This collaboration addresses these structural challenges through an intelligent infrastructure designed to bridge the gap between AI-driven travel needs and confirmed bookings.

For travel agencies and TMCs, Travelport's platform handles much of the decision-making and verification work currently done manually, such as rapidly presenting relevant options, automating changes and rebookings, and incorporating information about itinerary disruptions (e.g., delays and cancellations) into workflows. For instance, agents managing corporate travel can present routes with statistically lower risks of disruption. According to Travelport customers, reducing daily work time by just one hour per agent across large TMCs can lead to millions of dollars in annual productivity gains.

For online travel agencies, the challenge is structural. While travelers increasingly use AI tools for planning, transaction systems often cannot interpret the nuances of their intent. Travelport's MCP-based architecture allows for the direct conversion of conversational requests from travelers into confirmed bookings with real-time availability, turning this capability gap into real business opportunities.

Ravi Kumar, CEO of Cognizant, stated, "This collaboration provides Travelport with the tools to respond more rapidly and deliver higher quality outcomes at scale, addressing the challenges of a changing travel distribution landscape."

John Mangelaars, CEO of Travelport, commented, "Through this collaboration with Cognizant and Anthropic, we are harnessing the true power of AI. Anthropic provides the most high-performance AI models and tools, Cognizant adds the engineering talent and development capacity to deploy them at scale, and Travelport provides the travel infrastructure and partner network that connects it all to the actual distribution and booking environment."

Regarding the MCP protocol developed by Anthropic, Mangelaars added, "Anthropic also developed MCP, a protocol that allows AI agents to interact directly with external systems and data. Choosing the organization that invented that protocol was the obvious choice. Their approach to safety, reliability, and control is equally important. Travel is a high-trust environment where data is sensitive and errors have real consequences."

This is not a limited pilot; the goal is to transform how Travelport handles large-scale development. The initial focus areas are 'Travelport Trip Services,' a platform that handles bookings, changes, refunds, and service responses, and the MCP-based interface layer above it. The initiative is built on Travelport's cloud-native platform, and the first customer-facing features are expected to launch this year.