Seattle-Tacoma International Airport wants to get this message heard… it no longer wants passengers calling it ‘Sea-Tac,’ the much-loved and decades-old moniker that locals and visitors commonly refer to the airport, despite a $300,000 rebrand in early 2020 that dropped the nickname.
While the airport is still officially known as Seattle-Tacoma, the Port of Seattle brought in consultants from Turnstyle Studio and Stoke more than six years ago to try to rationalize the various names that the airport was known by.
Turnstyle Studio said the airport was going through a “brand identity crisis”. Operationally, the airport was often referred to as the ‘Port of Seattle,’ nationally it was more commonly known by its official airport code ‘SEA,’ while locals preferred to call it ‘Sea-Tac.’
The consultants decided that the best way to resolve this brand identity confusion was to drop two of the airport’s used names:
- The airport would be given its own branding for the first time, dropping the ‘Port of Seattle’ from its identity.
- Nicknames were also to be banished, so ‘Sea-Tac’ was eliminated from the branding.
Instead, the primary name for the airport would be its unique three-letter airport code: SEA. Elsewhere, the airport would also be referenced by its full name: Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The use of the airport code as the primary name of Seattle-Tacoma came about because it’s something that travelers are already incredibly familiar with. The airport code not only appears on luggage tags, booking reservations, and flight search engines, but it’s also used by many other airports as their primary brand name.
How are airport codes assigned?
Airports around the world are assigned both a three letter code and a four letter code.
- The three letter code is managed by the International Air Transportation Association (IATA).
- The four letter code is assigned by managed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Like many IATA airport codes, Seattle-Tacoma’s identifier is derived from the first three letter of the city name, whereas the ICAO code is KSEA (The letter K appears at the front of all ICAO codes in the contiguous United States)…