Airport branding and vision statements: An analysis from the tourism perspective

Abstract

In recent decades, airport management companies have placed greater emphasis on marketing and branding. One way of understanding the branding efforts of any organization is to analyze the content of their vision statements. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on airport branding by analyzing the content of 91 vision statements of airports. The analytical framework involves deductive measurement and a content analysis regarding keywords identified in a literature review and those related to the tourism destinations. For the data analysis, airports were segmented with respect to geographic location, passenger movement, and governance models. The results show that 11% of the airport vision statements featured a tourism theme and European and Asia/Pacific airports had the highest proportion of tourism-related content. Midsized airports had more tourism-related content and airports with a joint management arrangement and those run by municipal governments were more likely to have a strong tourism component.