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The campaign to reopen the airport is currently underway and has seen involvement from various stakeholders, including local government officials, regional authorities and community leaders.
The airport was closed in November 2022 shortly after the COVID-19 Pandemic with reported losses by its owners indicating that the airport was not financially viable, making its continued operation unsustainable.
There are ongoing and significant efforts to re-opening the airport with South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority approving £138 million funding package to support efforts to re-establish the airport.
Branding: Airport with three names
How the airport had been named was always a contentious issue because the airport played a key role across South Yorkshire with Sheffield as the only city in the region. In May 2022 Doncaster, Milton Keynes, Colchester were the three English towns that were awarded city status , 6 months before the airport named Doncaster Sheffield Airport (DSA) was closed. Originally the airport was called Robin Hood Airport and in 2016 the airport changed its name to Doncaster Sheffield Airport as part of a rebranding exercise, dropping the Robin Hood connection.
Locally the airport was called either Doncaster Airport or sometimes referred to as Finningly Airport because it was RAF Finningly upon which the airport is based. Liverpool who is famous for the Beatles aptly named its airport after John Lennon and it is called Liverpool John Lennon Airport.
The cultural idea of naming the airport Doncaster Robin Hood airport created a lot of controversy because Robin Hood in common culture is associated with Nottingham, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.
Do they rebrand with the same name?
Naming is key part of the branding exercise. One of the most important considerations is the kinds of conversations people have when they are travelling. Drivers of all kinds and the public at large need to know where to travel to. Having Doncaster in the name certainly helps with navigation and it avoids the “where is that?” question, where drivers and operators from outside an area are searching the Internet to locate somewhere that is not on their GPS System.
Rebranding does not necessarily involve changing the name. Rebranding is about thinking of the identity. Brand name is one part of an identity and the other parts are the logo, the visual identity, the tagline and the business messaging.
There could be a slip up. The programme to re-open the airport and develop a new economic area around it is called South Yorkshire Airport (SYAC). The airport may change its name to South Yorkshire Airport.!
It could be argued that but perhaps the clue to the naming might be in the name of the programme to reopen the airport. The programme is South Yorkshire Airport City (SYAC) and the programme is to open the airport and develop a new economic area around it. The airport could simply be named South Yorkshire Airport.! There is however a SYA, which is Eareckson Air Station, a military airport of the United States Air Force. Lets hope the £136 million investment is not wasted discovering this.
What the UK needs to avoid is people booking an airport transfer from somewhere outside the region and having a hour long conversation about why the airport in Doncaster is named after someone that lived in Nottingham, like before. You can only imagine the return journeys with a Doncaster Cabbie that explain nobody has a clue why it was and is still called Robinhood Airport.
DSA or SYA
Everything is in a name. There are now two cities in South Yorkshire, Doncaster and Sheffield and ideas do take time to evolve. Lets just hope the airport is named appropriately and following the same schema as Leeds/Bradford Airport (LBA) for two cities that the airport is located between is a perfectly good plan for what locals have always just called Doncaster Airport.
Focussed rebrand, keep the name
DSA is a perfectly good name, but to rebrand it would require a measured attempt at getting the more important factors right, including its business messaging attracting carriers to the airport which ultimately is what economically sustains air travel.