Swedavia Brand Guidelines: Sweden’s 2010 State Airport Company & Its Ten Airports

A state airport company carved out in 2010.

Swedavia is younger than most of the airports it runs. In the autumn of 2009 the Swedish government proposed, and the Riksdag approved, moving the airport business of Luftfartsverket, the state civil aviation enterprise known as LFV, into a limited company wholly owned by the state, Swedish Wikipedia says, citing government bill 2009/10:16. Swedavia AB took over the airports on 1 April 2010; the company says the operations “were acquired on April 1, 2010” from LFV, which kept air navigation services and still trades as LFV.

All shares in Swedavia AB are owned by the Swedish State, and the Ministry of Finance represents them at the annual general meeting, the company says. Its registered office is in Sigtuna Municipality, north of Stockholm, and English Wikipedia places its head office in the air traffic control tower at Stockholm Arlanda Airport. Its articles of association describe the business as financing, owning, administering, operating and developing airports, and give it a task to help meet the transport policy goals set by parliament “based on sound business principles,” in the company’s words.

The name is older than the company. Swedish Wikipedia says “Swedavia” was taken from a subsidiary that LFV set up on 1 July 1982 to separate its external business, including work in Saudi Arabia, from the state agency; that earlier unit became part of LFV as Swedish Aviation Consultancy when the new airport company took the name in 2010.

The network was trimmed at the start. English Wikipedia says there were 16 state-owned airports when the decision to form Swedavia was made, and that six were to pass to local owners while ten large airports stayed. Jönköping and Skellefteå went before Swedavia existed; Region Värmland took Karlstad in 2010; Ängelholm–Helsingborg and Örnsköldsvik were handed over in 2011; and on 17 June 2013 the municipalities of Sundsvall and Timrå took over Sundsvall–Härnösand, which was renamed Sundsvall–Timrå, Swedish Wikipedia says, citing Sundsvalls Tidning.

Ten airports, one national system.

Swedavia describes itself as owning and developing “the national basic range of airports in Sweden,” ten airports that it says form a system linking the country internally and with the world. The two largest are Stockholm Arlanda, which the company calls Sweden’s largest airport, and Göteborg Landvetter, the second largest. The others are Stockholm Bromma, the city airport, and seven regional airports stretching from Malmö and Ronneby in the south to Luleå and Kiruna in the far north, with Visby on Gotland in between.

Traffic has been recovering since the pandemic. In January 2026 Swedavia reported that passenger numbers across its ten airports grew by 2 per cent in 2025, and that eight new airlines and 37 new scheduled routes had been added during the year, 23 of them at Arlanda. In November 2026 the trade magazine Airport World reported that more than 3.1 million passengers travelled through the ten airports in October 2026, and that Arlanda and Landvetter both recorded their highest international passenger numbers for any October.

Swedavia earns from more than landing fees. Its website groups the business into aviation charges and route incentives, advertising sold to the airports’ travellers, commercial property and land, shops and restaurants, energy and telecoms services, and office space at Arlanda marketed as Office One. It also runs the planning of the airports themselves, presented on its site as building “the airports of the future.”

On Swedavia’s own website each airport is listed under its own place name — Stockholm Arlanda Airport, Göteborg Landvetter Airport, Åre Östersund Airport — with Swedavia named as the owner. The corporate name, Swedish Wikipedia notes, was already well established in international aviation through the earlier LFV subsidiary when the new company took it.

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 hub to strengthen and a city airport in question.

One open question for Swedavia is the balance between its two Stockholm airports. In December 2024 the company told the Swedish government that it no longer saw a viable future for Bromma, citing low use of its capacity, English Wikipedia says, citing Dagens Nyheter. The decision is not Swedavia’s alone: Bromma stands on land owned by the City of Stockholm, and Swedavia’s lease runs until 2038, the aviation news site Flygtorget reported on 6 November 2026. A state airport inquiry presented in the autumn of 2026 proposed a review point no later than 2033 before any long-term decision, Flygtorget added — a proposal, not a decision to keep or close the airport.

Charges are part of the same story. From 1 January 2027 Swedavia’s new charges model lowers the passenger charge at Arlanda and raises it at Bromma, and adds a Hub Incentive programme at Arlanda for airlines that meet its terms, Flygtorget reported; three smaller airlines that fly from Bromma criticised the change as favouring Arlanda. On 2 November 2026 Swedavia said its board had stopped planning and design work on a proposed new pier at Arlanda, so that other investments at the airport could be carried out sooner, and that the decision did not affect landing and passenger charges for 2027.

For a design guide, Swedavia shows how a state company can sit behind ten airports that each keep their own place names. Compare Avinor, Norway’s state airport operator, and Fraport, the Frankfurt airport company. For this guide we use a night blue, a slate, an ice grey and a lingonberry red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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