Have you ever wondered when travelling by plane what airport codes are for? The combination of letters on your boarding pass identifies your origin and destination airports. But, how are they selected?
At present, there are over 20,000 airports with commercial traffic and cargo around the world; This created the need to establish a system permitting the precise and quick recognition of each of them. The activities of airports are divided into two different operations.
There’s, on the one hand, commercial activity governed by airport’s IATA codes. This encompassed facilities from check-in desks to boarding gates, as well as restaurants, basically, everything relating to providing a service to passengers.
On the other hand, there is the sector that deals with airplane operations, governed by ICAO codes.