Anthropic, Cognisant, and Travelport have formed a strategic alliance to update the travel industry’s IT systems for the age of artificial intelligence. Software testing, operational workflows, and software development will all be brought up to date by deploying Anthropic’s Claude AI models across Travelport’s distribution and retail platforms for travel.

When it comes to the travel sector, legacy booking systems are having a harder and harder time keeping up with the changing behaviour of travellers and the search experiences powered by artificial intelligence. This is where the collaboration comes in. The two companies are working together to close the gap between trip planning powered by conversational AI and booking systems that process transactions in real-time.

By incorporating Claude into Travelport’s engineering platforms and development processes, Cognisant will facilitate AI-assisted code generation, automated test creation, and pull-request review capabilities, as part of the initiative to support Travelport’s AI transition. Additionally, Travelport’s complicated codebases will be analysed using Anthropic’s large-context AI models, which will simplify enterprise-scale software modernisation.

The firms have announced their intention to work together in order to integrate intelligent automation into Travelport’s platform ecosystem and speed up AI-led innovation for online travel agencies, hotels, airlines, and TMCs around the world.

Itinerary management, rebooking, swaps, and disruption monitoring are just a few of the manual operations that agents at travel agencies and TMCs now have to do by hand. These tasks should be automated by the platform. Agents will be able to find routes with less disruption risk and increase operational efficiency with the help of the system’s predictive intelligence capabilities.

The partnership is an effort to help online travel firms overcome the shortcomings of their present booking infrastructure, which is unable to properly understand trip requests made through conversational AI. In order to turn conversational planning into confirmed bookings, Travelport’s MCP-based architecture will let AI-generated travel queries to interface directly with live inventory and booking systems.

Cognisant CEO Ravi Kumar S said the collaboration shows how businesses are increasingly requiring technological infrastructure builders and scalers to update their practices. According to Travelport CEO John Mangelaars, AI is already changing the face of travel technology. The partnership brings together the AI skills of Anthropic, the engineering knowledge of Cognisant, and the worldwide distribution network of Travelport.

A crucial component of the partnership, according to Mangelaars, is Anthropic’s creation of MCP, a protocol that enables AI agents to communicate directly with third-party systems and datasets. He went on to say that because client data is so sensitive and mistakes may have such a significant operational impact, reliability, safety, and controllability are still very important in the travel industry.

Travelport Trip Services, which handles bookings, exchanges, refunds, and servicing, will be the primary emphasis of the initial implementation. Later this year, the first customer-facing features are planned to arrive on Travelport’s cloud-native platform, where the work is being built.

According to Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances at Anthropic, the partnership exemplifies how AI reasoning powers may bolster intricate organisational modernisation initiatives, especially in infrastructure-heavy industries like travel.

Aligning with Cognizant’s AI Builder strategy, which aims to scale enterprise AI usage across industries, the program also expands the broader strategic agreement between Anthropic and Cognisant, which was announced in November 2025.

Image Credit: Travel Weekly