Airline To Launch First Flight From the U.S. To This Isolated Island

There is currently no way to get to this idyllic location directly from America.

When it comes to travel, the faraway and hard-to-reach has always elicited both extreme curiosity and high prices.

The Caribbean island of St. Barths and French Polynesia's Bora Bora are served by a very small number of airlines and were recently reported to be some of the most expensive vacation destinations in the world.

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Another remote travel destination -- the Faroe Islands. While its 2022 population just surpassed 52,000 people, the Danish archipelago in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean welcomes over 110,000 visitors a year — most of whom are drawn in by the Faroes' views of glaciers, fjords, and mountain cliffs.

'Historic Route Between the U.S.'

While closer in distance to the U.S. than the European continent, the Faroe Islands have long been inaccessible directly from the country — the easiest way was to fly into a capital like Copenhagen or Oslo and then catch a regional flight on Atlantic Airways, the flagship carrier serving the islands.

This is set to change with Atlantic Airways' announcement of a new route between the island of Vágar and New York's Stewart International Airport. Travel website One Mile At A Time was the first to report on this route.

With the inaugural flight set for August 22, 2023, the New York-Vágar flight will run once a week until October 4 of each year. It will depart from Stewart, an hour outside New York City, on an Airbus A320neo plane with 174 economy seats.

"We are very excited about this new historic route between the Faroe Islands to the U.S. Interest for this new route is very high on both sides of the Atlantic," Atlantic Airways CEO Jóhanna á Bergi said in a statement.

Meant to serve growing American interest in the remote islands, the flight is also historic because Atlantic Airways currently services only four other cities that are all in nearby Nordic countries — Denmark's Billund and Copenhagen as well as Reykjavik and Oslo.

Smaller and Low-Cost Airlines Are Experimenting With Exciting New Routes

The U.S. flight will cover 3,024 miles, take around six hours in each direction and, unlike the other Atlantic Airways locations, only run during the warm season.

Atlantic Airways has for years toyed with the idea of a US flight given Americans' long-time fascination with the islands (and ability to pay big bucks to get there).

While this route is tailored to a very specific type of hardened traveler, a number of smaller Scandinavian airlines have been trying to boost tourism by launching low-cost flights between Europe and North America. 

At the start of 2023, new Icelandic budget Play launched a new route between Toronto and Reykjavik and celebrated by selling some one-way tickets for $20.

Norse Atlantic Airways only launched in 2021 but is already flying more than 14 routes between Europe and North America for prices around $150. Fly Atlantic is another budget airline hoping to stimulate local industry by redirecting some transatlantic travel through Belfast.

It is currently getting ready to launch in summer 2024. Recently-appointed CEO Andrew Pyne hopes to have 35 routes to and out of Belfast by 2028.