How Claude is shaping the future of travel
Anthropic positions AI as enterprise infrastructure, not a consumer toy
In the closing session of Skift Global Forum East in Abu Dhabi, Anthropic’s Head of Americas, Kate Jensen, explained how Claude is being built to power enterprise travel applications — not to compete with consumer-facing chatbots. The focus is on hotel personalization, service automation, and operational efficiency, delivered in a way that is secure, interpretable, and aligned with how travel companies actually work.
Key takeaways
- Enterprise-first design: Claude is being developed as a business platform, enabling hotels, travel management firms, and airlines to integrate AI directly into their internal systems and guest touchpoints — rather than serving as a general public chatbot.
- Beyond conversation: Claude is intended to execute workflows, not just answer questions — helping with tasks like customer service routing, itinerary changes, on-property requests, and revenue or inventory management.
- Trust, governance, and transparency: Jensen emphasized that reliability, safe reasoning, and data protection are non-negotiable in travel, where guest identity, preferences, and payment information must be handled with confidence.
- Skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP): These capabilities allow Claude to securely connect to external systems — PMS, CRM, CRS, channel managers, airline inventory, corporate travel tools — creating customizable, shareable workflows across teams.
- Agentic systems with memory: Claude will be able to remember context over time, enabling deeply personalized travel experiences — from repeat business travelers to complex multi-stop leisure planning.
- A new personalization model: Instead of one-size-fits-all offers, hotels and travel brands can deliver context-aware recommendations, assistance, and upsells based on guest history and intent.
- Human-centered augmentation: The goal is not to replace staff — but to let AI handle the repetitive and procedural, so humans can focus on hospitality, problem-solving, and care.
Watch the full session at Vimeo (Skift)