Abstract
There is considerable literature on the concept of placelessness (Relph, 1976) and ‘nonplace’
(Augé, 1995). Much of this comes from the geography literature, but the developing
area of ‘mobilities’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2002) opens this discussion to include those
working in tourism and hospitality. Many examples (e.g. Merriman, 2004) use transport
hubs such as airports, train stations and motorway service stations as research sites, yet
some locations appear to have been very successful in creating an identity where there was
little before (Lohmann, Albers, Koch & Pavlovich, 2009). This study gathered qualitative data
from 120 airport customers of Auckland International Airport in New Zealand. The paper will
consider whether those people expressed the feeling that airports are liminal spaces
(Turner, 1969) which become ‘non-places’ as a result of being ‘spaces in transition’. Using
Auckland Airport as a case study it considers what airport customers feel is important in
terms of giving a location an identity, and what this particular airport is doing to meet those
needs.
