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.
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Courtesy of Blade Urban Air Mobility
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.
