SWF: It's New York, and it's in Play

Stewart International Airport (SWF), 70 miles north of Manhattan, has a brighter future with three recent key changes.

First, despite its remote location and sketchy transit connections to the Big Apple, it's now listed in Expedia, Orbitz and other search engines as one of the New York airports, along with JFK, Newark and LaGuardia (and Westchester and MacArthur).

And second, it's found a new partner for international service, upstart Icelandic carrier Play, which has seven European destinations and is adding SWF as its third in the U.S., all with stops in Iceland. Its other U.S. bases are Boston and Baltimore/Washington.

International service has been missing from the airport since Norwegian pulled its service to Shannon, Dublin and Edinburgh because of financial difficulties, and the grounding of the 737 Max, the plane Norwegian was using for the routes. In the meantime, Stewart has finished building a spanking new international terminal, originally intended for Norwegian.

Other airlines serving SWF are Spirit and Allegiant, both of them catering to the mid-Hudson region around Stewart rather than city-bound travelers.