Cognizant is working with Travelport on a strategic AI transformation that will deploy Anthropic’s Claude to modernise the way Travelport builds, tests and maintains software across its travel retailing and distribution platforms.
The collaboration aims to accelerate the delivery of AI-led innovation to airlines, hoteliers, travel management companies and online travel agencies worldwide, while embedding AI features within Travelport’s platform.
Booking systems built for a previous era now strain to keep up: agency costs have grown as human agents increasingly piece together complex itineraries manually, and a gap has opened between how travellers now search using AI tools and what current platforms can interpret and fulfill. This collaboration will address these structural challenges through intelligent infrastructure designed to close the gap between AI-driven travel intent and a confirmed booking.
The programme is designed to address growing complexity in travel booking and servicing. For travel management companies, Travelport aims to automate tasks such as rebooking, exchanges and disruption management. For online travel agencies, the company is developing tools that can convert conversational AI travel requests into bookings using live availability data.
Travelport’s customers indicate that saving even one hour per agent per day across a large TMC translates into millions of dollars in annual productivity improvement.
“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.”
“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. “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.”
“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,” said Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances, Anthropic.
Cognizant will integrate Claude into its engineering platforms and delivery processes, including its Neuro AI multi-agent accelerator. The AI models will be used for code development, test creation and software review, with the aim of reducing software delivery times.
The companies said the work builds on Cognizant’s wider AI Builder strategy and extends its partnership with Anthropic, first established in November 2025.
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