The Mechanics and the Magic: Rethinking Why We Pack Our Bags
Canadians are seemingly waking up to a broader world right now, stretching their legs and reimagining exactly what it means to cross borders. It’s less about just ticking a destination off a map and more about the actual motivation behind the booking—building fresh trade routes, forging real connections, and getting to the absolute core of why we bother leaving home in the first place. This shifting mindset is exactly what Toronto-Pearson is tapping into with their new podcast, Y We Travel. They’ve gathered a crew of travel writers and deep thinkers to unpack the underlying drivers of modern transit, looking at how our craving for meaning spills over into the broader industry, influencing everything from flight routes and terminal architecture right down to the food we grab before boarding.
Hosted by former journalists Eric Weiner—a New York Times bestselling author—and Toronto TV reporter Erica Vella, who’s now on the inside at Pearson, the bi-weekly show is hitting Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon just in time for your summer road trips. They’ve lined up a cracking roster for the first season, featuring travel essayist Pico Iyer, columnist Elizabeth Renzetti, survivorman Les Stroud, influencer Chloe Bow, and Porter Airlines boss Michael Deluce. Karen Mazurkewich, Pearson’s VP of Stakeholder Relations and Communications, reckons that even though they handle more international connections than any other airport in North America, travel is about a hell of a lot more than just shifting bodies from point A to point B. It’s about discovery, community, and wrapping our heads around our place in a world that’s spinning faster by the day.
Interestingly, Y We Travel actually kicked off as an essay series in The Walrus magazine, backed by Pearson and the Canadian Airports Council. It clearly struck a chord, picking up a nod for a 2025 Canadian Magazine Award and taking out the 2025 print communications prize from Airports Council International – North America. It makes for genuinely compelling listening if you care at all about how getting on a plane shapes our individual and collective identities.
But here’s the rub. You can wax lyrical about the romance of travel all you want, but the minute you’re travelling for work, the magic usually takes a backseat to the sheer hard yakka of admin. Booking flights, tracking receipts, arguing with finance—it’s enough to make you want to stay grounded. Thankfully, while the podcast tackles the philosophy, the tech sector is finally sorting out the logistics. Over in the US, corporate travel giant Navan just used their ‘Navigate’ user conference to drop a brand new suite of AI tools designed to basically obliterate the busywork for travel admins, finance teams, and the road warriors themselves.
They’re building what they call an “agentic ecosystem”—a highly analytical way of saying they’ve got AI assistants that can actually do the heavy lifting from start to finish. Take their new Travel Admin Companion. Instead of drowning in spreadsheets, an admin can just ask the system in plain English to figure out why travel costs spiked last month or how their spend stacks up against industry peers. Down the track, Navan says you’ll be able to manage live crises directly in the chat, like blocking a destination if things go sideways, tweaking travel policies on the fly, or running predictive models to see how a budget might blow out if you change the booking window.
For the bean counters, the Expense Admin Companion is targeting the messy end of the stick. Navan figures they’re already automating about 73% of transactions seamlessly. This new tool goes after the remaining 27%—the ones flagged for dodgy activity or missing info. Rather than a human having to chase someone down, the AI suggests actions and drafts contextual messages to the employee, hiding the pending item from the main queue until the right details are coughed up. It’s all about letting finance bosses delegate the grunt work without losing their grip on compliance and risk.
And for the actual travellers? The new Book with AI feature means you can literally just type, “Need to be in London next Tuesday for three days,” and the system will chat back with policy-compliant options pulled from a massive inventory of over 600 airlines and 2.5 million hotels. You book and pay right there in the chat. Even better is the “Expense with video and voice” rollout. You just shoot a quick video of a crumpled receipt, dictate what the expense was for, and the system generates the claim without you typing a single word.
Michael Sindicich, Navan’s President, reckons this obsession with putting the user at the absolute centre of every decision is what’s giving them the edge. They’re banking on these new AI-driven features to deliver massive value, especially while legacy corporate travel setups remain bogged down in archaic infrastructure that just wasn’t built for the AI era. These new admin companions and AI booking tools are currently in beta, but they’re slated to roll out across the platform soon. It’s a brilliant duality, really. By letting the machines handle the mindless bureaucracy of getting there, we just might free up enough mental bandwidth to appreciate the journey itself.
