Fraport Brand Guidelines: A 1924 Lineage, Rhein-Main and Airports on Four Continents

A 1924 lineage and an airfield in the forest.

Fraport, in full Fraport AG Frankfurt Airport Services Worldwide, is the listed company that runs Frankfurt Airport. Its own history page says it was founded in 1924 under the name Südwestdeutsche Luftverkehrs AG and first ran Frankfurt’s airport at the Rebstock field, west of the city centre; English Wikipedia gives the same founding year and name. German Wikipedia is more cautious: its article on the airport says that in 1924 the Rebstock field was placed under the city’s Südwestdeutsche Luftverkehrs-AG and scheduled services began, while its article on the company gives the founding date as 1947, the year the present operating company was set up.

The Rebstock site soon ran out of room. German Wikipedia says a report commissioned by the mayor in 1924 doubted the field could grow, hemmed in as it was by railway embankments, and that the city decided in 1930 to build a new airport in the Frankfurter Stadtwald, the city forest, a plan stalled by the economic crisis. After the Nazis came to power they took over the plans in December 1933 and in January 1934 ordered some 600 hectares of forest cleared without official approval. The new Flug- und Luftschiffhafen Rhein-Main, an airfield and airship port, opened on 8 July 1936.

The war years are part of the site’s record. German Wikipedia says that after war broke out in 1939 all foreign airlines left Frankfurt and the airport was placed under the Luftwaffe, and that the airship halls were blown up in May 1940. From 23 August to 24 November 1944 the Walldorf subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp stood just south of today’s airport grounds. German Wikipedia, citing the Hessian regional history database LAGIS and the Walldorf memorial project, says about 1,700 Hungarian Jewish girls and women were forced to build the airport’s first concrete runway and other works for the construction firm Züblin under the Organisation Todt, and were deported to the Ravensbrück camp when the subcamp was closed; Soviet prisoners of war had already been made to clear trees. A memorial path opened in 2000, and a memorial and learning site over the remains of the camp kitchen opened on 25 September 2015, the same source says.

VAG, FAG and a new name in 2001.

The airport’s civil life restarted under American control. German Wikipedia says US troops occupied the site on 25 March 1945, that it served as the main base of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and 1949, and that the Verkehrsaktiengesellschaft Rhein-Main, or VAG, was founded in 1947 to build and run the administration and terminal buildings. In 1954 the VAG was renamed Flughafen Frankfurt/Main AG, or FAG; from 1955 its owners were the state of Hesse, the city of Frankfurt and the federal government.

The modern name came with the stock market. German Wikipedia says the company was partly privatised through a listing in 2001 and renamed Fraport AG Frankfurt Airport Services Worldwide, the short form joining “Frankfurt” and “airport”; Fraport’s own history page dates the listing to June 2001. The federal government sold its stake in October 2005. German Wikipedia gives the main shareholders in February 2025 as the state of Hesse with about 31 per cent, the city’s utility company Stadtwerke Frankfurt am Main with about 21 per cent and Lufthansa with about 8 per cent, with the rest in free float, and describes Fraport as a majority state-owned public company.

The company’s head office has stood since December 2012 in a new building at Gate 3 of the airport, German Wikipedia says, citing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Fraport has also put its name on sport in the region: the same source says it was the main shirt sponsor of Eintracht Frankfurt from 2001 to 2012, and that Frankfurt’s basketball club has played as the Fraport Skyliners since 2011.

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.

Airports from Lima to Ljubljana.

Fraport is as much an international business as a Frankfurt one. Its website says its portfolio of airports and airport-related companies includes 30 airports around the world, and names a new terminal at Lima in Peru, the management of 14 regional airports in Greece and retail centre management at airports in the United States. German Wikipedia says Fraport and the Greek Copelouzos Group won the Greek concession in November 2014 for 40 years, and that the handover of the airports, from Thessaloniki to Santorini, was completed in early 2017. The same source lists Ljubljana in Slovenia, taken over in 2015, Burgas and Varna in Bulgaria, Antalya in Türkiye, and Fortaleza and Porto Alegre in Brazil, awarded in March 2017.

Not every venture lasted. German Wikipedia says Fraport handed its stake in Frankfurt-Hahn airport to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2009, sold its stake in Hanover airport in 2018 and left Xi’an in China in 2022; in September 2024 it announced the sale of its stake in Delhi airport to the GMR Group. Its stake in St Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport was put on hold in March 2022 and, according to German Wikipedia, expropriated by Russia at the end of 2023. A terminal project in Manila, agreed in 1997, ended in legal disputes: German Wikipedia says the project was expropriated by ruling of the Philippine Supreme Court in 2003 and that an ICSID arbitration tribunal ruled against Fraport’s claim in 2015, while the Philippine courts later ordered compensation for the consortium.

At home the newest building is Terminal 3, on the south side of the airport, which German Wikipedia says opened on 22 April 2026. On 9 November 2026 the aviation site aero.de reported that Terminal 3 had run smoothly for its first half year, that Terminal 2 had stood empty since April 2026 and was not expected to take passengers again until about the mid-2030s, and that Fraport was considering joining Terminals 1 and 2 into one complex for Lufthansa and the Star Alliance, with a decision on rebuilding Terminal 2 not expected before 2029.

For a design guide, Fraport shows how an airport operator can turn a local company into an international brand. Compare Heathrow and Schiphol, two other large European hubs. For this guide we use slate blue, beacon amber and concrete with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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