Global Traveler Magazine Announces 2014 Airline and Hotel Winners
Global Traveler Magazine just announced the winners of the 2014 Airline and Hotel of the Year. Maybe a bit surprising to some, the top airline was United while the top hotel was Marriott.
Runner-up winners include Delta and Air Canada in the airline category. Hilton and Intercontinental Hotel Group were the runner-ups for hotels.
The reason I say the results may be surprising is that they determined winners from Global Traveler staff nominee selections rather than voting. Moreover, they have a strange rule: Once an airline or hotel is selected, they are ineligible to participate for three years. One has to wonder just how global this Global Traveler staff is. Do they ever have opportunities to travel outside the States? No offense to any of the winners but this may be why they are all U.S.-based firms.
Compare these results to Global Traveler’s 2014 GT Reader Survey awards. Unlike the previous questionable voting, these awards were based on 26,000 reader entries over the first eight months of the year. Etihad Airways won as airline of the year over 10-year winner Singapore Airlines while Westin (international) and Hilton (domestic) were some of the leading hotel winners.
Global Traveler also has awards for various regions. For example, Air Canada and IHG were the winners in North America but somehow, they were only good enough to be runner-ups in their own internal GT selections.
The magazine presented dozens of Reader Survey awards in dozens of categories, too many to list here. However, for the interested or curious, the entire list is available online.
A lot of the rankings are hard to take seriously. Best airline in Europe – TAP Portugal! Best business class seat design – Cathay Pacific is nowhere to be seen even though it has arguably the best long-haul business class seat in the business, and has it in the vast majority of its long-haul aircraft. Best airline in Central/South Asia – Air India. Granted the competition there isn’t intense but to put Air India ahead of Jet Airways strains credibility (and Kazakhstan’s Air Astana is another contender that isn’t even included).