Cognizant, the global IT services major, is collaborating with Travelport on a strategic AI transformation initiative aimed at modernising software development, testing and maintenance across Travelport’s travel retailing and distribution platforms using Anthropic’s Claude AI models.
The collaboration is expected to accelerate AI-driven innovation for airlines, hotels, travel management companies (TMCs) and online travel agencies globally, while embedding advanced AI capabilities into Travelport’s platform infrastructure.
AI transformation to modernise travel infrastructure
The companies said the partnership seeks to address growing inefficiencies in legacy booking systems that are increasingly struggling to support modern travel planning and distribution requirements.
Travelport noted that travel agents are currently spending significant time manually piecing together complex itineraries, while existing transactional systems are unable to effectively interpret AI-driven traveler search intent.
The collaboration will focus on building intelligent infrastructure capable of bridging the gap between conversational AI-based travel searches and confirmed bookings with live inventory access.
Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S said, “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.”
“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,” he added.
Focus on productivity gains for travel agencies
Travelport said the AI-powered platform enhancements are expected to automate several cognitive tasks currently handled manually by travel agents and TMCs.
These include surfacing relevant travel options faster, automating exchanges and rebookings, and embedding disruption intelligence directly into workflows.
The company highlighted that an agent handling a business traveler, for instance, could proactively identify travel routes with statistically lower disruption risks.
According to Travelport, saving even one hour per agent daily across a large travel management company could translate into millions of dollars in annual productivity improvements.
Conversational booking capabilities for OTAs
For online travel agencies, the partnership aims to solve the growing disconnect between AI-based trip planning tools and legacy transactional booking systems.
Travelport said its MCP-based architecture will enable conversational traveler requests to translate directly into confirmed bookings using live availability data, creating new commercial opportunities for digital travel platforms.
Travelport CEO John Mangelaars 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. 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,” he added.
Anthropic to power AI engineering capabilities
Anthropic will provide its Claude AI models to support reasoning across large and complex travel technology codebases as part of the collaboration.
Anthropic Head of Alliances Rich O’Connel said, “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.”
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