American Express Global Business Travel has become the latest TMC to link its platforms with a major AI assistant using a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection.
Europe’s largest TMC said in a statement that it has launched an Egencia AI connector within Anthropic's AI assistant Claude, which allows travellers to book and manage airline and hotel transactions through Claude, while remaining in a managed travel ecosystem.
Amex GBT said that this development will give employees the ability to ask Claude to look at their calendar, provide travel itineraries for upcoming events and help to make bookings that comply with their organisation’s travel policy.
The TMC added that the Egencia connector marked the first deployment of its internally developed AI agent-to-agent architecture, which facilitates the integration of full TMC services inside AI platforms.
Evan Konwiser, chief product and strategy officer at Amex GBT, explained: “With our Egencia AI connector in Claude, an employee or an enterprise AI agent can now search, book and manage air and hotel for a traveller within policy, personalised, and backed by our marketplace, while benefiting from being wholly within their existing Claude enterprise environment.
“That's true agent-to-agent integration for managed travel. It's a foundational capability, and we're just getting started.”
Amex GBT also announced the expansion of Egencia's conversational AI into Google Chat, which allows travellers to book and manage trips in “natural language” conversation. This can be used by early adopter clients from August before being made generally available by the end of 2026.
In another move, Amex GBT is launching an AI pilot within Microsoft Teams for customers using its Neo travel and expense platform.
Several TMCs and other companies, such as Perk (formerly TravelPerk), BCD Travel, Navan, Vibe Systems and expenses specialist Expensify, have also started linking their systems to leading AI assistants using MCP frameworks.
In a separate announcement on Friday (24 July), UK-based Identity Travel said it now enabled clients to book and manage business trips through several AI assistants, including Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, using Vibe’s new MCP server.
“Every booking tool has always asked the traveller to speak its language — this is the first time it works the other way round,” said Steve Banks, CEO of Identity Travel.
“That matters because it's exactly the kind of thing Al should be used for in travel, to make a managed programme easier to reach, not to replace it. Experience changes everything, and for the first time, an online booking can be as simple as saying what you need.”
Find out more about how MCP could reshape business travel by reading BTN’s in-depth feature on the subject.