PS Reserve and the Former Pan Am Headquarters Are Bringing the Golden Age of Travel Back

There was a time when flying meant something. When the airport was not a gauntlet to be survived but a threshold to be crossed. A place that understood that the journey was as important as the destination. That era had a name, and that name was Pan American Airways. And now, inside the very building where Pan Am once defined what it meant to travel with elegance and intention, that era has returned.

PS, the private luxury terminal quietly revolutionizing the commercial air travel experience, has officially opened its Miami location inside the former Pan American Airways headquarters at Miami International Airport. It is the brand’s fourth American outpost, and it may be its most symbolically resonant yet.

The Pan Am building at Miami International is not simply a piece of real estate. It is a monument to a particular vision of what travel could be, a vision that shaped the golden age of aviation and left an impression on the collective imagination that has never fully faded. The 1960s structure that housed Pan Am’s operations carries that history with extraordinary presence, and PS was deliberate and precise in its decision to honor rather than erase it.

Working with RJ Heisenbottle Architects and celebrated interior designer Cliff Fong, PS has transformed the 34,000 square-foot landmark with a reverence for its past and a clarity of vision for its future. The building’s defining mid-century Brutalist character, recognized as a Miami-Dade County Historic Site, has been preserved throughout. Original Pan Am airline insignias, gold paneling, and reflecting pools have been carefully restored and reintegrated into a design that feels continuous rather than reconstructed. What has been layered on top draws from Miami’s tropical glamour: terrazzo, marble, smoked glass, and bold patterns that feel entirely of this city without ever feeling like a pastiche of it.

Cliff Fong described the approach with characteristic precision. The building carries a strong identity, he noted, and the design leaned into its heritage alongside the nostalgia and romance of Miami’s regional style. From the broad range of colors and textures to the individual character of each Private Suite, every decision made to create memory and reinforce experience. The result is a space that feels simultaneously historical and entirely alive, a rare achievement in any design context and a particularly meaningful one here.

At its core, PS exists to do one thing: remove every point of friction from the commercial travel experience and replace it with something that feels, from the moment of arrival to the moment of departure, like it was designed entirely around you.

At PS Miami, that experience takes two distinct forms. The Salon is an elevated social lounge conceived for solo travelers and business travelers who want a beautifully designed, sophisticated environment in which to work, dine, and decompress before a flight. The Private Suite takes the concept considerably further, fully private, residential-style accommodations built for discretion, comfort, and the particular ease that comes from knowing that every detail, every coordination, every potential complication has already been handled before you were aware it existed.

Across both experiences, the PS signature is consistent: private BMW chauffeur transfers, chef-prepared dining, spa treatments available on request, and the brand’s Control Room. A behind-the-scenes coordination hub that works directly with security, airlines, and agency partners to ensure that every journey unfolds with a smooth, quiet precision that its members have come to rely on absolutely. Later this year, PS Direct will extend this further with integrated door-to-door transfers between aircraft and home or hotel, completing a seamless journey from the moment you leave your front door to the moment you arrive at your destination.

What separates PS Miami from a luxury lounge is not the Private Suites or the chef-prepared menus alone. It is the conviction that a space this historically and culturally significant deserves art that is equally considered. For this location, PS partnered with the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Art in Public Places program to commission Nina Surel. A Miami-based Argentinian artist and founder of The Collective 62, Miami’s first all-female art collective to create a series of integrated, artist-designed reflecting pools that anchor the terminal’s visual identity.

The work unfolds throughout the space: a stoneware bas-relief mural of interlocking ceramic tiles, a mosaicked pool, each piece drawing from Miami’s natural landscape and its layered cultural history. Surel described her color palette as derived directly from this environment. The pastels of the Art Deco District, the way subtropical light lands differently here than anywhere else, generous and unforgiving at the same time, revealing everything it touches.

Further art curation by Creative Art Partners rounds out a collection centered on light, material, and the visual rhythm of Miami itself: vibrant and expressive, balancing softer and bolder works with an energy that mirrors the city’s own. Additional pieces by Shaina McCoy, Neill Wright, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Holly Lowen, and others complete a collection that feels less like decoration and more like an extension of the building’s identity.

For PS CEO Amina Belouizdad Porter, the choice of Miami was both strategic and inevitable. As the nation’s second-busiest airport for international travelers and a critical gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, Miami International serves precisely the kind of globally connected, perpetually in-motion traveler that PS was built for. Opening inside the Pan Am building deepens that logic into something approaching poetry: a company dedicated to reimagining the modern travel experience choosing to do so inside the place where the romance of travel was once most fully realized.

At the ribbon cutting for PS Miami, that feeling was made literal. Former Pan Am flight attendants attended the opening, their presence transforming what might have been a standard launch event into something far more emotional and far more meaningful. For a brand built on the belief that travel should feel like something, there could not have been a more perfect gesture.

The golden age of air travel did not end. It simply went looking for a space worthy of it. At PS Miami, inside the building where Pan Am once changed what it meant to fly, it has finally found one.

For more information and to become a member, visit reserveps.com