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Editorial: ‘Vail’ should be in airport’s name

Alex Miller
Vail Daily Editorial Board
Vail, CO Colorado

LaGuardia, Sky Harbor, Ronald Reagan and DeGaulle airports all have something rather silly in common: They don’t tell you anything about where, exactly, it is you’re landing if you go there. It’s an unfortunate tendency humans have for naming big facilities after important dead people who will never know they have been so honored. And since an airport is a destination – much like a bus station – why not have that destination as part of the name to avoid confusion?

There are other reasons as well, as we’ve discovered here in Eagle County locally. After shelling out a heap of money to have some marketing consultant come up with a new name for the Eagle County Regional Airport, we got this: “Colorado International Airport.”

For starters, the name is too grandiose for what is essentially a tiny airport. The name simply over-bills the facility; makes it sound like the state’s major airport filled with dozens of gates, bookshops, enormous and expensive ugly sculptures, etc.



Not that our airport isn’t a perfectly fine little airport, with more plans in the works to improve it. But it is what it is, and that’s just the Vail Airport. Vail Mayor Dick Cleveland, although he has an obvious bias, is absolutely correct when he says “Vail” has to be in the name because, like it or not, Vail is the readily identifiable name that most closely connects all of Eagle County to the rest of the world.

We could live with the “international” in the name, although that seems a little high-falutin’, too, since we get very few international flights. We could even go with the other suggestion: “Vail-Eagle County Airport,” although it does seem a bit superfluous since, to be honest, not many people outside Eagle County know or care about that particular bit of nomenclature.

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At the end of the day, the benchmark for naming your airport is to include the most obvious and recognizable marker, and in this case, it’s simple: It’s “Vail.”


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