Exclusive Summer Camps for Elite Families: Luxurious Perks Including Helicopter Arrivals and Private Jets | Vanity Fair

When you picture a classic summer camp, you’re probably imagining a sun-dappled, woodsy setting, happy kids in shorts with slightly sunburned shoulders and mosquito-bitten shins. An A-frame structure is more than likely involved.

You probably don’t picture helicopters, seaplanes, and private jets, but these are becoming increasingly common on family visiting day at the full-summer sleepaway camps where many moneyed families opt to send their progeny.

Gregg Lapidus, codirector of the 110-year-old Raquette Lake Camp (once dubbed “the Harvard of summer camps” by Town & Country) tells Vanity Fair that the camp, nestled in the Adirondacks, is something of a rustic bubble with almost no Wi-Fi or cell service, a strict no-device policy, and an even stricter uniform dress code, designed to put the campers on equal footing. The thing about a bubble, however, is that there’s always something pushing from the outside—in this case, well-to-do parents.

“We have famous people’s children here,” Lapidus says. “We have billionaires’ children. Visiting day, helicopters come in and seaplanes come in and private jets come locally and we pick people up and we do all of that. That’s normal for us.”

On-demand private air travel service Blade has been offering camp visiting day and camp pickup transportation for about 10 years, but CEO Rob Wiesenthal tells VF that there’s been a sharp increase in usage in recent years.

“The growth, even from last year, is huge,” he says. The company completed between 100 and 200 camp-related trips alone this summer, he says, with the vast majority of trips looping between the Hamptons or Nantucket, where parents are summering, and the kids’ camps.

A trip between New York City and a camp in Maine—which can take upwards of six or eight hours in a car—may take around an hour and a half each way by air, and, depending on aircraft, could cost $8,000 to $15,000, according to Wiesenthal. Quite the taxi fare. “It’s not atypical that a round-trip flight to a camp can cost more than the camp itself,” Wiesenthal says.

The camps themselves can cost upwards of five figures. This year, Raquette’s tuition is $17,800, plus a $600 canteen fee, $275 for transportation, and additional costs for the required uniform items, which this year, based on the packing list and camp store pricing for female campers, add up to a minimum of $1,147.60 for the logo-stamped shirts, sweats, jackets, swimsuits, and more that campers wear, and can fluctuate up several hundred dollars more depending on choices and extras. Tuition for these tony retreats has always been premium, but has gotten even more expensive in recent years; according to Town & Country, in 2017, Raquette Lake’s tuition was listed as just over $13,000. An American Camp Association analysis of data from activity booking platform Sawyer showed that camps raised their prices 20% between 2024 and 2025, on top of the previous year’s 23% increase.

Elizabeth Weprin, a content creator based in Boca Raton, Florida, posts to her more than 46,000 Instagram followers as “Your Jewish Boca Mom,” with most of her content focusing on camps and colleges. She put both of her daughters, now 26 and 23, through eight years of Raquette Lake, with both returning for a year as counselors-in-training after aging out. Though Weprin didn’t attend sleepaway camp growing up, several of her husband’s family members are Raquette Lake alums, and her glowing experiences over the years with the camp mean that she’s still a presence at annual visiting days, showering her younger nieces with snacks, Neosporin, and goodies like this year’s hot-ticket toy request, squishy NeeDoh cubes. Now, as she did back when her daughters were campers, Weprin flies commercial to Albany or Syracuse, then rents a car and drives the remainder, stopping at a Walmart Supercenter along the way for the requested snacks and other items.

“When my kids went, I knew one parent who took a seaplane, and everyone thought she was just so obnoxious,” Weprin says. “And now it’s like, people are taking more than just seaplanes.”

She describes seeing the camp parking lot with many black cars, as more parents are opting to have private drivers pick them up from their helicopter or jet instead of driving themselves.

“I feel like it’s gotten more intense, more showy, more flashy,” she says. Lapidus described visiting day as “the Super Bowl for camp [directors],” and by Weprin’s description, it’s much the same for parents: “Now I feel like parents care more about what they’re wearing to camp, what they talk about with the other parents, and it’s gotten to be a lot showier. I think a lot of the parents use different camps as a status.”

Though she finds the one-upmanship “out of control,” Weprin says that those side-eyeing, herself included, may not know the full situation.

“I know parents who fly up private, and kids who went to camp private, and I can’t judge them,” she says. “It may just be what works, or that’s just their lifestyle, and it might be something that the kids know other kids do and have always wanted to do, or they get invited to go. There are just so many different scenarios that come into play, but for the most part, the kids are taking the bus or they’re taking the group flight on JetBlue or whatever airline.”

One program of Raquette’s ilk, Maine’s Camp Laurel, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the private White Plains Aviation Partners. Camp Laurel is seeking at least $355,000 in damages, and alleges that White Plains failed to provide promised services. (Vanity Fair has reached out to White Plains Aviation Partners for comment.) The bus isn’t looking so bad after all.

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