For the first time, Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) has been named a Five Star Ma­jor Air­line by the Air­line Pas­sen­ger Ex­pe­ri­ence As­so­ci­a­tion (APEX). CAL has pre­vi­ous­ly been named a Four Star Ma­jor Air­line in 2024, 2022, 2020, and 2019. But at the APEX/IF­SA Glob­al EX­PO Awards Cer­e­mo­ny held in Cal­i­for­nia, the lo­cal car­ri­er did one bet­ter than last year, cop­ping the APEX Five Star Ma­jor Air­line 2026 award. It’s the on­ly Caribbean car­ri­er to be named in that cat­e­go­ry along­side air­lines such as Alas­ka Air­lines, Hawai­ian Air­lines, Jet­Blue Air­ways, and French bou­tique air­line La Com­pag­nie.

Ac­cord­ing to glob­al non-prof­it APEX, the awards are based on cer­ti­fied third-par­ty pas­sen­ger feed­back. Over one mil­lion flights were rat­ed across near­ly 600 air­lines and in­de­pen­dent­ly cer­ti­fied by an ex­ter­nal au­dit­ing com­pa­ny. APEX al­so made changes to the 2026 APEX Five Star rat­ings cri­te­ria, lim­it­ing it to the Top 40 air­lines in the world, which rep­re­sent less than 7% of the air­lines rat­ed world­wide. Col­lec­tive­ly, the awards recog­nised the Top 100 air­lines in the world for pas­sen­ger ex­pe­ri­ence.

“What sets the APEX/IF­SA Awards apart comes from how our awards pro­gram moves be­yond recog­ni­tion; it ac­tive­ly dri­ves ex­cel­lence across our en­tire in­dus­try,” APEX/IF­SA Group CEO Dr. Joe Leader stat­ed. “Un­like oth­er award plat­forms, these hon­ors re­flect both the voic­es of mil­lions of glob­al pas­sen­gers and the rig­or­ous as­sess­ments of in­de­pen­dent ex­perts. This pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion es­tab­lish­es the APEX/IF­SA Awards as the most trust­ed and im­pact­ful dis­tinc­tion in avi­a­tion to­day.”