Browsing by Author "Manninen, Emma-Liina"

The standardisation of airports has turned airports into similar non-places without history and connection to their surroundings. Recently the business environment of airports has become tougher, as airports are forced to compete for passengers in order to stay in business. The non-place character is a competition disadvantage for an airport, and therefore new means need to be developed in order to sustain competitiveness. A wide range of services as well as local culture are used to create a sense of place at an airport. The passengers are being offered new experiences and airports are even advertised with the experience orientation. The objective of this thesis is to find out whether the hard work on improving the image of the airports with spectacular projects has had an effect on how the passengers see the airport or does their view still represent the stereotypical image. The primary research question is how people perceive the airport today and are the perceptions in line with the definition of a non-place. I went through 195 airport reviews from ten European airports. Applying the discourse analysis I studied the different views of the airports that have arisen. The repeating patterns were divided into six themes according to their topics, in other words six different discourses were used to discuss airports. The customer reviews comprised the images of an airport as a physical building, a sensory environment, a hangout, a subject of a change, a social setting and as a visiting card of the area in question. A discourse analysis is based on a thought that the language is not a neutral describer of the reality, but rather the language builds the reality and is itself a product of culture. In other words, the themes that have arisen do not represent the absolute truth about the essence of an airport, but they rather provide different viewpoints on the concept of an airport. As I reviewed the discourses I found out that both the past and the present of the airports have their impacts on the images the passengers have about the airport in question. Though travelling is an essential part of the western lifestyle and the airports have become mundane, airports still represent modernity and terminals are important buildings. On the other hand, to this day the images of the past appear to have an impact on the experience of the flying passengers. According to the airport reviews, airports have both the characteristics of a place and a non-place. Still the passengers do not automatically see the standardisation of the airports as a negative feature, as the effectiveness and the similarity of the airports eases the travelling, and the widespread of the Internet helps keeping the important things always at hand. A part of the survey participants found that airports could standardise even further and concentrate on the needs of the passengers instead of local culture.