Our annual Readers’ Choice Awards winners have been announced! We loved poring over the results to find out what’s sticking with readers and spinning the data into a snapshot of the current moment in travel. Ahead: your manual for planning that next adventure. View the complete list of Readers’ Choice Award winners here.
“There’s a cooler with drinks and snacks in the back,” First Officer Mike Moraes tells us from the cockpit. “Help yourself. If you need anything, just tap us on the shoulder.” Soon the whirl of the turboprop signals our ascent. As we soar over the New England coast, the small aircraft jostles through billows of fluffy cumuli as if we’re surfing a wave. Once we clear the cloud line, Mike leans over to give his copilot, Captain Ed, a fist bump.
I’m one of eight passengers, who include a couple of guys in suits and a local teenager who’d been dropped off by her mother, all traveling from White Plains, New York, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, with Tradewind Aviation, which ranks #4 among the United States’s top domestic airlines, according to Condé Nast Traveler‘s Readers’ Choice Awards. Part of a growing market known as semiprivate aviation, the carrier offers scheduled book-by-the-seat flights on board charter aircraft. In recent years semiprivate carriers like Tradewind, JSX (#6), and Aero (#10) have expanded their scheduled service offerings with online booking and real-time pricing and availability, making some of the perks of private air travel more accessible than ever.
Instead of schlepping to JFK, I arrive just before takeoff at Million Air, Westchester County Airport’s aptly named private terminal. There is no TSA security screening and no crowded concourse. I am welcomed by concierge team members, who take care of my luggage before handing me a red plastic card with the motto Flying Personal. It’s a surprisingly accurate tagline. But a trip on Tradewind should not be confused with flying private: The seats on the Pilatus PC-12 aircraft are arguably worse than those in commercial economy. The true luxury is being able to circumvent the chaos of commercial airports. “Even if you’re flying first class, it’s a 20-minute walk just to get through the terminal,” says Jen Lozada, Tradewind’s vice president of revenue. With Tradewind, passengers need to arrive only 30 minutes before takeoff.
It’s a convenience travelers are often willing to pay a premium for. Tradewind reports a roughly 33% year-over-year increase in scheduled service bookings across its routes in the US and the Caribbean. As demand rises, semiprivate carriers are expanding their connectivity. This May, Aero launched a bicoastal Los Angeles–to–New York flight featuring Erewhon meals and Starlink Wi-Fi. This past July, JSX inaugurated two new routes from Southern California to Napa County Airport, one of 11 airports to which it flies that are ineligible to receive commercial service. And in December, Tradewind will triple its flight capacity to the Bahamas, with new scheduled service to Nassau and additional routes from Fort Lauderdale to Marsh Harbour and North Eleuthera.
The result is a democratization of infrastructure; the Westchester airport’s private terminal, for instance, had formerly been off-limits to most travelers. “It’s all there,” says Alex Wilcox, CEO of JSX. “The runways are there, the air traffic control is there—but unless you’ve got a private airplane, you haven’t got access to it. So we’re changing that.”
This article appeared in the November 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
