Travel New England Travel Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Travel New England Travel Awards is and who runs it

The Travel New England Travel Awards is a readership award from Boston Magazine, the Boston-based publication whose masthead carries Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC. The magazine frames the program simply: for its annual New England Travel Awards, it asks readers to nominate their favorite resorts and attractions across the region, and a companion line invites them to vote for their favorite New England travel destinations now.

The ballot is hosted on the magazine's own website, at bostonmagazine.com, under its travel section. There is no third-party contest platform involved, which means the nomination form, the branding, and the results announcement all stay inside the magazine's own properties. The voting page carries the title "New England Travel Awards: Nominate Your Favorites!" and sits alongside the magazine's other franchise coverage.

The program's home market is Boston, Massachusetts, but its reach is regional rather than city-bound. The ballot speaks to the whole New England region, and the magazine's own coverage area spans Massachusetts and its neighbors, so a resort in the Berkshires and a festival on the coast are competing for the same readers' attention.

Vertically it sits in the best-of family: a business award decided by public vote, in the travel niche. That puts it in the same broad genre as the magazine's better-known Best of Boston (Boston Magazine) franchise, though the two programs cover different ground, as the section below on neighboring ballots explains.

The dated record: which cycles are confirmed and when voting ends

Two cycles of the Travel New England Travel Awards are confirmed: 2025 and 2026. The magazine's own page labels the current edition "The 2026 New England Travel Awards: Nominate Your Favorites," and the awards section of bostonmagazine.com shows activity across both years, which is what supports the annual label the magazine itself uses.

The single dated deadline on the page is the close of voting: "Voting closes Friday, June 5." That sentence is the anchor for the whole cycle, because it tells a nominee exactly when the window shuts regardless of when it opened. The magazine pairs the deadline with a forward promise, telling readers to look for the October 2026 issue of Boston Magazine, which is where the awards results are slated to appear.

What the page does not carry is the other half of the calendar. Boston Magazine has not printed an opening date for the nomination window, so a supporter cannot tell from the page alone how long the form has been accepting entries or how much time remains beyond the June 5 close. The magazine has also not published window dates for future cycles, including whether a 2027 edition will run and when its form would open.

For a nominee planning a push, the practical reading is this: the deadline is fixed and published, the opening is not, and the results date is fixed and published. Everything else about the calendar belongs to the cycle in progress, and the awards page during the current window is the only place the full picture appears.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic is a nomination form, plain and direct. The page's own instruction reads: "Tell us your favorite resorts, festivals, and attractions across the region." A supporter arrives at the awards page on bostonmagazine.com, reads the short pitch, and fills in the form with the names of the places they want to recognize. There is no bracket, no head-to-head round, and no separate finalist stage described on the page; the nomination itself is the vote.

Because the form lives on Boston Magazine's own site, the supporter's path is short. No external contest software, no login wall, and no third-party branding sit between the reader and the ballot. The magazine's navigation around the form is its standard travel-section menu, so a reader who follows a link from the magazine's coverage lands on the ballot in a click.

Three practical notes follow from that shape. First, the entries a supporter types are free text about places, so spelling the resort, festival, or attraction the way customers already know it matters. Second, the deadline of Friday, June 5 is the only published gate, and the form's behavior before that date, including whether it accepts repeat submissions, is not described on the page. Third, the magazine has not printed any rule about who may vote or how often; those mechanics, if they exist, are enforced by the form itself, and a supporter should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

After submitting, the supporter's part is done. The magazine handles the rest, with results promised for the October 2026 issue.

How this ballot sits beside its New England neighbors

Boston's readership-award market is crowded, and the Travel New England Travel Awards occupies a specific slot in it. Its closest sibling under the same publisher is Best of Boston (Boston Magazine), the magazine's flagship city franchise. The travel awards differ in scope: where Best of Boston sorts the city into many local categories, the travel awards look outward at resorts, festivals, and attractions across the whole New England region, and they run on a much narrower ballot.

Other programs in the same market answer to different publishers and different geographies. Best of Boston and Boston.com Readers Say both serve the Boston audience from other newsrooms in the Globe Media family's orbit. Best of Cape Cod from Cape Cod Life narrows to the cape, BOSS - Best of South Shore covers the South Shore, and Central Mass Community Choice Awards works the western part of the state. Each is a separate ballot answering to a separate publisher, with rules of its own.

What makes the travel awards distinct within that crowd is the combination of a regional travel focus, a single publisher's own site as the host, and a June close that feeds an October issue. A business with a New England-wide customer base, such as a resort or a regional festival, has fewer ballots that fit it than a Boston restaurant does, and this is the one in the set built for exactly that footprint.