Adani Airports Brand Guidelines: Six Airport Bids, Mumbai in 2021 & a Lotus-Shaped Terminal

A conglomerate’s first step into airports.

Adani Airports is the airport business of the Adani Group, the Ahmedabad conglomerate that English Wikipedia says began in 1988 as a commodity trading business and grew into ports, power, mining, gas and infrastructure. Its operating company, Adani Airport Holdings Ltd (AAHL), was incorporated in 2019 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship listed company, the group says.

The opening came from the state. In November 2018 India’s central government cleared a proposal by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to lease out six of its airports, and the following month the AAI began an international competitive bidding process for contracts to operate, manage and develop them, English Wikipedia says. The Adani Group emerged as the highest bidder for all six — Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram — and signed concession agreements with the AAI, the group says; The Times of India reported in February 2019 that the group had won bids to run the airports for 50 years.

The airports themselves stay in public ownership. The AAI remains the owner, and the airports are run by special-purpose companies set up by Adani Enterprises as concessionaires: at Ahmedabad, English Wikipedia says, Ahmedabad International Airport Limited signed its concession agreement with the AAI on 14 February 2020, giving it the right to operate, manage and develop the airport.

Not every handover was smooth. At Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala, public-interest litigation was filed over the bidding, and the Union Cabinet approved the award subject to the outcome of a writ petition; the AAI signed a letter of agreement with the group in September 2020, English Wikipedia says, and control was to pass only after a concession agreement was signed and legal hurdles were cleared.

Mumbai, then a new airport across the harbour.

Mumbai came next. Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL), which runs Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, had been led by the Hyderabad-based GVK Group. In August 2020 the two groups settled a dispute over control: Adani agreed to acquire the debt of GVK Airport Developers, which held 50.5 per cent of MIAL, and so gain a majority, The Hindu BusinessLine reported on 31 August 2020. On 13 July 2021, after approvals from the Government of India, the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) and the Government of Maharashtra, AAHL took over management control of MIAL, Telangana Today reported the next day. The group now gives its stake in MIAL as 73 per cent; English Wikipedia gives 74 per cent for Adani Enterprises, with the AAI holding the rest.

English Wikipedia describes Mumbai as India’s second-busiest airport by total and international passengers in 2025, after Delhi. Its main terminal, T2, was designed by the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and built by Larsen & Toubro before the Adani era. In March 2024 the group announced a plan to demolish and rebuild the older Terminal 1, and in August 2025 said its closure would be delayed to fit with the opening of Navi Mumbai’s second terminal, English Wikipedia says.

With MIAL came Navi Mumbai International Airport, in which MIAL holds 74 per cent. English Wikipedia traces the project to a proposal by CIDCO in November 1997, Union Cabinet approval in August 2007, a GVK-led win in February 2017 and a groundbreaking in February 2018. In March 2018 Zaha Hadid Architects was appointed, after a 12-week competition, to design the passenger terminal and control tower, and the terminal has a lotus-shaped design that will be complete once three linked terminals are built in phases. Construction by Larsen & Toubro began in August 2021 under Adani management; the first phase was inaugurated on 8 October 2025, and commercial flights began on 25 December 2025, when an IndiGo flight from Bengaluru made the first scheduled arrival. Dedicated freighter flights followed on 1 August 2026, English Wikipedia says.

Across its eight airports the group says it handled 96.4 million passengers in the financial year 2026.

How airport operators present themselves.

An airport operator has an unusual design problem: most of the people who meet its brand never think about the company at all. They read its signs. Wayfinding is the core of the identity, and operators typically commission a sign typeface, a pictogram set and a colour code for departures, arrivals, gates and exits, then apply them to everything from motorway approach signs to the backs of check-in desks. The corporate logo often sits quietly in a corner while the directions do the work.

Architecture carries the rest of the image. Operators’ own photography tends to favour terminals at dusk, when glazed façades glow against a darkening sky, long roofs read as clean lines and an apron full of parked aircraft becomes a pattern of lights. Interiors are shown as wide, calm halls rather than queues, and new piers or façades are announced with renderings long before they open.

The numbers come next. Route maps radiating from a single hub, new long-haul destinations and passenger milestones are standard material for press pages and annual reports, because traffic is what airlines, investors and local governments want to see. Alongside them sit pages on sustainability and noise: carbon programmes, noise contour maps, insulation schemes for nearby homes and community funds, often written for neighbours rather than travellers.

Finally, an airport is also a shopping centre and a lounge network. Retail, food and lounge promotions follow a lighter, more commercial register, with seasonal campaigns and partner brands, while investor reports return to a sober corporate grid of charts and tables. The operators in this series show how one company can speak in all of these voices at once: public utility, landlord, retailer and listed or state-owned business.

Group legal matters, and a Nairobi proposal that ended.

As part of the Adani Group, Adani Airports has lived alongside the legal questions facing its parent group. In January 2023 the US short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing the group of stock manipulation and accounting fraud; the group denied the allegations, English Wikipedia and the Bangkok Post say. In November 2024 US prosecutors in New York charged senior group figures with securities and wire fraud offences over an alleged bribery scheme tied to solar-power contracts, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil case; the group called the accusations “baseless,” the Bangkok Post reported on 21 November 2024. In August 2026 a federal judge in Brooklyn granted the US Justice Department’s request to dismiss the criminal charges against three of the accused, Mint and LawBeat reported; the group has consistently denied wrongdoing, Mint said.

The airport business met its own setback abroad. In 2024 a proposed 30-year arrangement for the group to run Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi drew protests in Kenya; the Kenyan High Court suspended the proposal in September 2024, and in November 2024 Kenya’s president announced its cancellation, English Wikipedia says.

At home the network is still being built: Navi Mumbai opened with one terminal of a planned three, and Mumbai’s Terminal 1 awaits its rebuild.

For a design guide, Adani Airports shows how a conglomerate presents a new airport network under one group name, with Navi Mumbai’s lotus-shaped terminal as its showpiece. Compare GMR Airports, the rival Indian operator that bid against GVK for Navi Mumbai, and Malaysia Airports. For this guide we use a deep teal, a lotus rose and a saffron with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Adani Airports’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.