GMR Airports Brand Guidelines: Delhi in 2006, Hyderabad in 2008 & a New Vizag Gateway

An infrastructure group that bid for India’s airports.

GMR Airports is the airports business of the GMR Group, an Indian conglomerate headquartered in New Delhi. English Wikipedia says the group traces its origins to 1978, when Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao acquired a jute mill at Rajam, in Andhra Pradesh. It later moved into businesses including banking, insurance, software, breweries and sugar, and after India’s economic liberalisation in the early 1990s sold many of them to concentrate on infrastructure: airports, energy, highways and urban development.

The group entered airports in 2003 through its subsidiary GMR Airports, English Wikipedia says. An early project was in Hyderabad. In November 2000 the Andhra Pradesh government and the Airports Authority of India agreed to build a new greenfield airport as a public–private partnership, with the state and the authority holding 26 percent and private partners 74 percent. A consortium of GMR and Malaysia Airports Holdings won the private share. In December 2002 Hyderabad International Airport Ltd, later renamed GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited (GHIAL), was created as the project company, and a concession with India’s central government followed in December 2004.

Delhi came next. In May 2006 the running of Indira Gandhi International Airport, which began in 1943 as the wartime base RAF Palam and took its present name in 1986, passed from the Airports Authority of India to Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), a consortium led by GMR, according to English Wikipedia.

Delhi, Hyderabad, Goa and abroad.

The two big concessions shaped the company. In Delhi, a new runway opened in September 2008 and Terminal 3 began operating in 2010; a further runway and an eastern cross taxiway opened in July 2023, English Wikipedia says. It gives the airport’s traffic for the year to March 2025 as more than 79 million passengers, the highest in its history, and says it has been India’s busiest airport by passenger traffic since 2009.

Hyderabad’s new airport was built at Shamshabad, south of the city. Construction began in March 2005, the airport was inaugurated on 14 March 2008, and commercial flights started on 23 March 2008, replacing Begumpet Airport, English Wikipedia says. It gives the airport’s traffic for the year to March 2025 as more than 29 million passengers, and describes a site that includes a cargo terminal, two runways, a solar power plant and maintenance facilities. In April 2021 the group announced GMR Hyderabad Airport City, a commercial district on land around the airport, and it runs an aviation training school, GMR Aero Academy, there.

English Wikipedia lists GMR’s other Indian airports as Manohar International Airport in Goa and Nagpur’s Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport, with a civil enclave at Bidar in Karnataka from 2020. Abroad, it names the new Heraklion airport project in Crete, Greece. In the Philippines, GMR has worked on the Mactan–Cebu and Clark international airports since 2014, The Business Times of Singapore reported in September 2026. The same report described the government in Manila courting GMR for a planned airport at Sangley Point; GMR had said it was interested, but no funding commitment had been announced.

Ownership has changed too. In July 2020 the French operator Groupe ADP, which runs the Paris airports, acquired a 49 percent stake in GMR Airports, English Wikipedia says. The Business Times describes GMR Airports as the group’s listed aviation business on the National Stock Exchange of India.

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.

A new gateway for North Andhra Pradesh.

The newest airport opened in 2026. Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport, a greenfield airport at Bhogapuram in Vizianagaram district, near Visakhapatnam, was built by GMR as a public–private partnership and designed to handle 6 million passengers a year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated its passenger terminal on 1 August 2026, with the group’s leadership showing him around, the news agency IANS reported in Telangana Today.

The terminal was used to present the region. It was decorated to show the culture, traditions and arts of Andhra Pradesh, and a large piece of Etikoppaka artwork was displayed at the welcome gate, IANS reported. The operator described systems including building information modelling, an airport predictive operations centre, biometric passenger processing and automated baggage handling.

Commercial flights began on 17 August 2026, with domestic services and international routes to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, BusinessLine reported. The opening day’s first flight was an IndiGo service from Hyderabad, and Scoot’s service from Singapore was the first by a foreign airline. The airport is run by a GMR company, GVIAL, whose chief executive called the opening “the beginning of a new chapter” for the region’s connectivity.

GMR’s two largest airports carry civic names rather than the group’s own: Delhi’s is named after the former prime minister Indira Gandhi and Hyderabad’s after the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, English Wikipedia says, while the GMR name appears in operating companies such as GHIAL.

For a design guide, GMR Airports shows how an infrastructure group can stand behind airports that keep their own civic names and present regional craft in the terminal. Compare Delhi Airport, the GMR-led concession at Palam, and Adani Airports, another Indian private airport group. For this guide we use indigo, sandstone and a marigold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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