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When you book your flights and airport parking you might have noticed abbreviated codes appearing here and there.
You’ll find them mostly on baggage tags and tickets but once you’ve spotted them, you’ll see them in lots of other places too. In fact, we use them at Looking4Parking while processing your airport parking orders to make sure your orders go through to the right airport.
These three letter codes, known as International Air Transport Association (IATA) airport codes, are used internationally to identify nearly 10,000 airports around the world. It’s much easier for people within the aviation industry to say and write LHR instead of London Heathrow Airport every time and is also universal, so people with different languages and regional accents don’t get mixed up.
IATA codes first started to be used in the 1930s when the explosion of air travel made it a necessity to have some way of identifying different airports. The letters are usually taken from the name of the airport, so CDG represents Charles de Gaulle in Paris and MAD is Madrid.
Ever wondered why Los Angeles International Airport is known as LAX?
Originally some US airports had adopted a two letter code system and when the three letter code was adopted, they just added an X to the end of their existing codes.
So, if you’re trying to find Glasgow Airport, is it LGW or GLA?
We’ve put together a list of the most commonly used UK airport codes to help you book the right airport to fly from and book your airport parking for.