Budapest Airport Brand Guidelines: Ferihegy 1950, a 2005 Concession & the Liszt Name

A brewer’s estate, a tender of 1939 and a terminal drawn like an aircraft.

Budapest Airport is the company that runs Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport, Hungary’s main airport, about 16 kilometres south-east of the city centre. For most of its life the airport was simply called Ferihegy. Hungarian Wikipedia says the name comes from Mayerffy Xavér Ferenc, a Buda brewer who leased land there at the end of the eighteenth century, and that a sandy hill on the site was levelled during the airport’s construction in the 1940s.

The plan dates from the late 1930s. English Wikipedia, citing the airport’s own history, says the idea of a new airport at the boundary of Pestszentlőrinc, Rákoshegy and Vecsés was born in 1938. Hungarian Wikipedia adds that weather measurements on the site began in February 1939 and that a public tender for the terminal was announced that September. In December 1939 the jury chose the design of the modernist architect Károly Dávid Jr., whose terminal, seen from above, resembled a large aircraft: Hungarian Wikipedia reads the main hall as the fuselage, the upper floors facing the airfield as the wings and the two control towers as the engines.

The war years interrupted the project. Work began in 1942, and a 16-kilometre road to the city was built between 1940 and 1943. English Wikipedia says civil construction stopped at the beginning of 1944 and that many of the buildings were damaged before the war ended. The sources used for this guide do not say who carried out the construction work of 1942–1944.

Reconstruction for civil flying was decided in 1947. Hungarian Wikipedia says the site was cleared of explosives, damaged buildings were repaired or rebuilt and concreting of the first runway began in 1948. The airport opened on 7 May 1950, first used by Maszovlet, a Hungarian-Soviet airline founded in 1946, with a handful of routes to Prague, Bucharest, Warsaw and Sofia. Malév was founded in 1954, its Vienna route of summer 1956 was the first scheduled service to the West, and the Dutch airline KLM became the first Western carrier to fly to Budapest in 1957.

Two terminals, a 75-year concession and a return to state ownership.

The airport grew in steps. English Wikipedia says passenger numbers reached one million in 1974. A new control tower designed by Iván Nieder opened in 1983, Hungarian Wikipedia says, together with a second, 3,707-metre runway parallel to the first. Terminal 2 followed on 1 November 1985 and Terminal 2B in 1998, when all foreign airlines moved into it. The old Terminal 1 was refurbished in 2005 for low-cost airlines and closed to commercial passengers in May 2012.

Ownership changed in December 2005. English and Hungarian Wikipedia both say the British airport group BAA bought a 75 per cent stake together with the right to operate the airport for 75 years. BAA soon sold on: on 6 June 2007, English Wikipedia says, a consortium led by the German Hochtief AirPort completed the purchase, with three financial investors, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, GIC and KfW IPEX-Bank. The company’s BUD Future programme of 2007 to 2011 produced SkyCourt, the hall that joined Terminals 2A and 2B, opened on 27 March 2011. In May 2013 Hochtief sold its stake to the Canadian pension investor PSP Investments and the airport division was renamed AviAlliance, which remained the largest shareholder.

The name changed in the same period. Hungarian Wikipedia says that, by a government decision of 25 March 2011, the airport took its present name in honour of the composer Franz Liszt, known in Hungary as Liszt Ferenc, in the year of his 200th birthday. The airport road and the railway stop beside it still carry the Ferihegy name.

Hungary’s national airline, Malév, stopped flying in February 2012, and English Wikipedia says the airport lost its transfer traffic as a result. Low-cost airlines filled the gap: the VINCI Airports site describes the airport as the main base of Wizz Air, founded in 2003.

In June 2024 ownership moved again. The Hungarian business daily Világgazdaság reported on 6 June 2024 that the Hungarian state had bought back Budapest Airport through Corvinus, a state-owned investment company, with VINCI Airports taking a 20 per cent stake. VINCI Airports says it became the operator under a concession that runs to 2080, and it gives the figures for 2025 as more than 19.5 million passengers and 141 destinations.

How airport operators present themselves.

An airport operator presents itself in two registers at once. Passengers meet the airport: its name, its signs, its terminals and its departure boards. Investors, governments and partner cities meet the operator: the company that holds the concession, publishes traffic figures and announces new terminals. Many operators keep these two faces apart, with a passenger-facing airport name and a separate corporate name for the group behind it.

Inside the terminal, the identity is carried mostly by wayfinding. Signs are set in a clear sans-serif, in short words with arrows and pictograms, and colour is used to separate departures, arrivals, transfers and ground transport. Some operators describe their signage as a system in its own right: VINCI Airports, for example, says its customer signage and furniture come in several ranges, so that each airport in its network can choose items to suit its size and budget.

Online, the airport becomes a guide to places. Route maps, destination pages and airline lists show where a traveller can fly, while terminal and runway photography, often taken at dawn or dusk, gives the airport a recognisable image. Retail, dining and parking pages present the terminal as a place to spend time, and some operators extend this into an “airport city” of hotels, offices and transport links around the runways.

The corporate layer is plainer. Owners and concession holders publish newsrooms, traffic reports, logo downloads and press photography, and they describe their airports by passenger numbers, routes and terminal projects, with dates. For designers, the category shows how one identity can work at walking pace for a hurried traveller and, at the same time, as a sober record for shareholders and the public authorities that grant the concessions.

A company name, an airport name and a place name that never quite left.

Budapest Airport works with three names at once. The company calls itself Budapest Airport, the airport’s official name since 2011 honours Liszt, and Ferihegy lives on in the road, the railway stop and everyday speech. The VINCI Airports page for the airport uses the Liszt name together with the three-letter code BUD, beside the concession dates and the lengths of its two runways, 3,707 and 3,010 metres.

Its architecture tells the longer story. Dávid’s terminal, chosen in 1939, was drawn as an aircraft in plan, according to Hungarian Wikipedia, and included a large terrace for visitors and spectators at air shows. The later buildings were added for growing traffic: Terminal 2 in 1985, Terminal 2B in 1998 and SkyCourt in 2011, which English Wikipedia says now houses the main departure lounge and shopping area between Terminals 2A and 2B.

Growth is the current theme. In an interview with Világgazdaság published on 2 March 2026, given just after the foundation stone of a new terminal called Terminal+ was laid, Nicolas Notebaert, chief executive of VINCI Concessions and president of VINCI Airports, said passenger traffic had grown by 12 per cent the previous year to close to 20 million, and that the plan combined an expansion of Terminal 2 with an entirely new terminal over seven years. VINCI Airports also says passenger surveys by Skytrax ranked the airport first in its region in each year from 2014 to 2023.

For a design guide, Budapest Airport shows how a code, a place name and an honorary name can live side by side without one replacing the others. Compare VINCI Airports, its operator and minority owner, and VINCI, the parent group. For this guide we use Danube blue, sand and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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