Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic collaborate to power AI‑era travel distribution

MCP arrives on Trip Services this year

In the AI era, travel distribution appears to be a game for teams of three. A few weeks after the formalisation of a partnership between Mindtrip, Sabre and PayPal, Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic have announced a collaboration designed to speed up the adoption of artificial intelligence at the core of travel retailing and distribution platforms. In both cases, the ambition is to connect agentic AI to transactional infrastructure capable of searching, pricing, booking, modifying and servicing a real trip. The aim is no longer merely to inspire or advise the traveller, but to give them access to actual trip execution.

While the first trio aims to smooth the consumer journey from inspiration through to payment, the Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic partnership is more about infrastructure. It seeks to transform the technology base on which agencies, travel management companies (TMCs) and distribution platforms run. Cognizant is integrating Anthropic’s Claude model within its engineering environments to accelerate software development, test generation and code review. At Travelport, an MCP‑based layer will sit on top of Trip Services — the platform that handles bookings, exchanges and refunds — within a cloud‑native platform. Operationally, the goal is to surface relevant options faster, automate exchanges and rebookings, and embed “disruption intelligence” within workflows.

Travellers now express their intent via AI tools, yet transactional systems still struggle to interpret that richness and turn it into confirmed records. For agencies and TMCs, the challenge is also to reduce manual work for advisers and gain in both reliability and processing speed.

“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,” said Rich O’Connell, Head of Alliances, Anthropic.

A genuine AI superpower

Travelport stresses this is not a limited pilot. The work begins with Trip Services, with a major release said to be imminent and the first customer‑facing features expected this year. The roadmap emphasises the safety, reliability and controllability of AI agents — an imperative in a highly data‑sensitive environment where errors have real‑world consequences for travellers and operators. That requirement for trust echoes, from another angle, the role assigned to PayPal in the Sabre–Mindtrip alliance: securing one of the most sensitive steps in the journey — payment.

The partnership extends Cognizant’s AI Builder strategy and follows the company’s closer alignment with Anthropic in November 2025.

“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, 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.”