Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic have joined forces to build an AI-powered travel system that will modernise how travel tech is built, tested and maintained.
Delivering AI-led innovation to airlines, hoteliers, travel management companies and online travel agencies worldwide, Travelport’s new platform embeds multiple AI features.
Older booking systems are struggling to keep up: agency costs have increased as agents create complex itineraries manually and a gap has opened between how travellers search using AI and what current platforms can fulfil.
The collaboration will address the structural challenges and help close the gap between AI-driven travel intent and a confirmed booking.
Travelport’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based architecture will allow conversational traveller requests to translate directly into confirmed bookings with live availability, turning the gap into a real commercial opportunity.
For travel agencies and TMCs, Travelport’s platform will absorb more of the manual work agents currently do, including finding options faster, automating exchanges, rebooking and embedding disruption intelligence into workflows.
Travelport’s customers say that saving even one hour per agent per day across a large TMC translates into millions of dollars in improved annual productivity.
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 partner network that connects it all.
The initial focus is on Travelport Trip Services, the platform that handles bookings, exchanges, refunds and servicing, with the MCP-based interface layer above it.
Built on Travelport’s cloud-native platform, the first customer-facing capabilities are expected to launch this year.
John Mangelaars, Chief Executive Officer of Travelport, said: “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. Collaborating with Cognizant and Anthropic gives us a genuine AI superpower.”
Ravi Kumar S, Chief Executive Officer of Cognizant, commented: “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 landscape. That’s what the AI Builder model is designed to do. 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.”
Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances at Anthropic, added: “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.”
