What Airports Can Learn From Stadiums and Ballparks

This summer marks the peak season for air travel, as millions of travelers take to the skies. As an aviation designer, I’m often thinking about how to solve the influx of passengers through concourses, hold rooms, and circulation diagrams. So, for an escape, I’ve turned to America’s pastime — the beautiful, torturous, and magically random game of baseball.

There’s an atmosphere around baseball that I hadn’t fully grasped until recently. After attending countless weeknight games to experience the game more fully in person, it hit me. There are striking similarities between airports and baseball stadiums, and as aviation designers, we may have something to learn.

Two Complex Machines

Stadiums and airports may be two of the most complex public buildings one can design. Though their purposes may differ — one built for the thrill of the game, the other for the movement of people — they share a surprising number of design challenges. Both must function as mashups of typologies, combining the demands of transportation, retail, hospitality, security, entertainment, and operations into a single, unified experience.

In many ways, they are each a city within a city. A stadium might blend a high-energy arena with restaurants, private clubs, press boxes, broadcast facilities, merchandise shops, and back-of-house logistics. An airport does the same, bringing in gates, security checkpoints, and baggage handling, but still requiring shopping, dining, lounges, and support operations. Both are tasked with creating legible, high-performance spaces that can absorb crowds, guide behavior, and keep people moving while also delivering moments of comfort, orientation, and sometimes even awe.

Both stadiums and airports require highly choreographed circulation patterns. Both have a mix of premium and general access areas. Both rely on large restroom cores, food and beverage services, and public gathering spaces. And both must convey a strong identity — connecting users to a specific place, culture, or team — without compromising clarity or efficiency.

The challenge in designing these hybrid environments is finding harmony among all these competing programs and pressures. It’s a kind of spatial diplomacy. And when it works, the result feels effortless — a seamless integration of parts into a whole that moves, breathes, and serves thousands.

Here are six lessons that airports and aviation designers can learn from stadiums and ballparks:

1. The Path Is Personal

One of the most striking similarities is the nature of personalized journeys. At both stadiums and airports, no two user paths are the same. Some arrive by train, others drive. Some grab food first, others head straight to their seat. Bathroom breaks, buying food and drinks, taking photos — all part of the experience.

Stadiums like Oracle Park in San Francisco handle these variables with an emphasis on intuitive circulation. There are places where the space gracefully absorbs hundreds of people flowing in different directions, allowing everyone to move freely without friction. And then there are the bottlenecks: where a long concession line bleeds into a main concourse, where a scenic view draws a crowd but leaves no room to stop and enjoy it, where restrooms or stairs interrupt instead of facilitating movement.

In airport design, we wrestle with these challenges daily. Poorly sized restrooms, narrow concourses near clusters of holdrooms, and concession areas that turn into queuing zones during peak hours. Keeping circulation free and flowing is not easy. Stadiums show us how it can be achieved, and where it breaks down.

2. Wayfinding Through Landmarks

Another shared feature is the challenge of wayfinding. Signage is important and provides the obvious first tool for navigation. But in a stadium, there are also strong visual cues to help orient spectators. The field, the scoreboard, the high mast lights. While obviously functional to the game of baseball, these can be anchors. Airports, too, need these spatial landmarks for the passengers: A view of the airfield, a clear security area, clear entry zones, and a central atrium that helps you reset your mental compass. We can take a page from stadiums by offering a better visual narrative to guide passengers — especially as terminals grow in scale and complexity.

3. A Stage for Civic Identity

One of the things stadiums tend to get right is their deep connection to place. Oracle Park feels unmistakably San Franciscan. It’s built into the bay, plays with the maritime backdrop, and serves food that gives spectators a taste of the city right in their seats. Just as a stadium belongs to its city, airports represent a gateway to a region or city. This is an opportunity for us to celebrate the local surroundings like a stadium would. Embracing regional identity — through materials, art, food, and views can all be successful tools to achieve this. Stadiums offer a potential blueprint: let the experience reflect the city.

4. Amenity as Experience

From special club seats to standing room drink rails, stadiums offer memorable amenities and layered experiences for different audiences. Even if you’re not a box ticket holder, you can still find small moments of luxury or surprise — an overlook, a craft beer kiosk, or a children’s play area in the outfield. In the aviation industry, tiers of premier status can elevate your travel experience, but we must design and integrate these types of amenities and experiences for all passengers, not just the ones with all the points.

5. Backstage and Operations

Another parallel lies in the operational zones. Both airports and stadiums have large-scale, behind-the-scenes functions: office spaces, loading docks, secure storage, and material sortation areas. The challenge is to keep these vital systems close enough to the action to function efficiently but hidden enough to preserve the public experience. In both building types, designers must choreograph these zones like stagehands during a performance — unseen but essential.

6. The Emotional Moment

Perhaps most importantly, both stadiums and airports have the power to evoke awe and wonder. That first glimpse of the field, that feeling of stepping onto a jet bridge with sunlight glowing on the wing — these are the emotional moments that stay with people. Great design makes room for these moments. It gives space.

So next time you’re in a stadium, take a moment to look past the scoreboard. Watch how people move. Notice where they pause. Think about how the building makes them feel. Whether we’re designing for the first pitch or the final boarding call, we’re designing for people. And people deserve spaces that are seamless to navigate, awe-inspiring, and work beautifully.