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BIA, the UK's sixth largest airport, is ditching its international title and restoring its former name Birmingham Airport. 

The rebrand is just part of a £13m redevelopment project that will see the airport's two terminals merged into one single facility. This will be accompanied by the introduction of new shops and restaurants and the expansion of the passenger security area.

Jo Lloyd, head of brand at Birmingham airport, stressed the need to highlight the airport's services to domestic users: 'We have plenty of spare capacity - enough to take another nine million passengers today - and of the 8 million people living within one hour's drive, less than 40 per cent currently use Birmingham so we need to make ourselves more visible to this market.

'Furthermore, we're the only UK airport with planning consent for a runway extension and the plans for a High Speed Rail link will reduce the rail journey time from London to just 38 minutes.

'We therefore see ourselves in a vital position as a strategic national asset, which can easily form part of the solution to the 'Heathrow Problem', and as such we need to create positive awareness about Birmingham's potential, to foster a sense of pride and grow loyalty from passengers living in the one and two hour catchment.'

Justine Hunt, PR manager at Birmingham Airport, said: 'We felt that given that we are an international airport, and have international flights, we do not think that we need to say that we are international. We are not just European, we fly internationally to the likes of Dubai, New York and Asia.'

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