WNBA Expands Charter Flights for 2023 Season, Including All Postseason Games

There will be more charter flights instead of commercial traveling for WNBA players during the 2023 season.

M.A. Voepel of ESPN reported the league will increase the number of times it uses charter flights to include every playoff game and when traveling for back-to-back contests during the regular season.

"One of my main goals has been to enhance the player-first experience," WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said. "While recognizing in a growing league our size and scale, doing things incrementally and chipping away at it is the best practice."

Voepel explained there has been incremental progress when it comes to the issue of charter flights.

Engelbert instituted the use of such flights in the playoffs when teams crossed multiple time zones with just one day off during her first year as commissioner in 2019. Last year's WNBA Finals between the Las Vegas Aces and Connecticut Sun featured travel exclusively via chartered flights.

Yet that doesn't mean the continued progress is guaranteed.

"This year, we're expanding to 40 games and we have a good footprint schedule-wise to do this," Engelbert said. "We are not yet at the point to say we'll fund every back-to-back in perpetuity. But we can this season."

Travel has been a sticking point in the WNBA with a number of players raising concerns about flying commercially on multiple occasions even though chartered flights weren't included in the 2020 collective bargaining agreement.

The league fined the New York Liberty $500,000 and removed Oliver Weisberg from the WNBA executive committee because team governors Joe and Clara Wu Tsai chartered flights during the second half of the 2021 season.

Joe Tsai even previously tweeted that he was going to "solve this transportation problem for good."

From the league's perspective, it saw the chartering of the flights as a competitive advantage since not every team was doing so to travel to road games.

While there are still a number of games that players will have to travel commercially to under these latest developments, it is still a step toward more comfortable travel for some of the most high-profile games of the upcoming WNBA season.