Cognizant is collaborating with Travelport on a strategic AI transformation initiative aimed at modernizing software development, travel distribution infrastructure, and booking workflows using Anthropic’s Claude AI models. The partnership focuses on embedding AI capabilities into Travelport’s travel retailing and distribution platform while accelerating software engineering and operational efficiency across the travel ecosystem.
Cognizant has announced a strategic collaboration with Travelport to modernize travel technology infrastructure using Anthropic’s Claude AI models and AI-driven engineering workflows.
The initiative aims to help Travelport accelerate software delivery, improve operational efficiency, and embed AI-powered capabilities directly into its travel retailing and distribution ecosystem. The collaboration also reflects growing demand for AI-enabled infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly dynamic and conversational travel experiences.
According to the companies, the project focuses on transforming how Travelport builds, tests, and maintains software across its cloud-native platform while enabling AI-driven travel servicing and booking capabilities.
The companies noted that traditional booking and distribution systems are increasingly struggling to keep pace with modern traveler expectations and AI-assisted search behaviors.
Travelport says travel agencies and travel management companies continue to face rising operational complexity as agents manually manage itinerary changes, disruptions, exchanges, and rebookings. At the same time, online travel agencies are encountering limitations in existing transactional systems that cannot fully interpret conversational AI-driven travel requests.
The collaboration seeks to bridge that gap through AI-powered infrastructure capable of translating traveler intent into actionable booking workflows.
For travel management companies, Travelport plans to automate several operational tasks, including disruption management, itinerary recommendations, rebooking workflows, and route optimization based on disruption risk intelligence.
The company stated that improving agent productivity by even one hour per day across large travel management operations could generate millions of dollars in annual operational savings.
A key part of the initiative involves Travelport’s MCP-based architecture, which is designed to allow conversational AI requests to translate directly into confirmed travel bookings with live availability and fulfillment capabilities.
Travelport highlighted Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a foundational component enabling AI agents to interact directly with external systems and enterprise data environments.
"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."
Cognizant will integrate Claude into its engineering platforms and delivery workflows, including Neuro-san, the open-source library behind Cognizant’s Neuro AI multi-agent accelerator.
Claude will support AI-assisted code development, automated test creation, pull-request review, and large-scale codebase analysis. The companies say the model’s large context window enables it to surface embedded business logic across complex enterprise software environments, a critical requirement for travel infrastructure modernization.
"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."
Rich O'Connell, Head of Alliances at Anthropic, also emphasized Claude’s role in enterprise-scale software modernization.
"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."
The Travelport collaboration aligns with Cognizant’s broader AI Builder strategy, which focuses on helping enterprises move AI initiatives from experimentation into production-scale deployment.
The company says its approach combines industry expertise, systems integration capabilities, and operational delivery support to help enterprises deploy full-stack AI solutions across complex business environments.
The first customer-facing capabilities from the collaboration are expected to reach the market later this year.
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.
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