Worn & Wound
Year in Review: the Best Travel Watches of 2025
Travel watches have been on the absolute rise in recent years. Where dive watches were once the default option for a first sports watch, GMTs, dual times, and world timers have been making a credible play for wrist time with enthusiasts of all strata. There are practical reasons for this - movements like the Miyota 9075 and Seiko NH34 have made including a GMT complication in a watch more affordable than ever - but I think practical reasons only scratch the surface of this precipitous rise. To tell the whole story, you have to look for the romantic. There’s an inherent appeal in travel watches. They’re optimistic and remind us to stay interested in the world even when we’re stuck at home, or work, or in the myopia of day-to-day life, when the little things around us stop us from looking further. I think this appeal was only reinforced by a mandatory two-year stay inside, at home, and I don’t think it’s by chance that our collective release back into the world post-COVID coincided with the rise of the travel watch. I mean, sure, in a world where our phones automatically adjust to new time zones, and most people’s preferred travel watch is an Apple Watch, mechanical travel watches (or, really, analog - there are some pretty stellar quartz offerings to be had, you don’t need to look further than the Timex Q Continental GMT for evidence of that) may be more talismanic than necessary, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. So, with all that ...
