Every February, by a mayoral proclamation, the Pensacola International Airport is temporarily renamed the Pensacola Intergalactic Airport in support and celebration of Pensacon, a North Americanmultigenre convention. Pensacon draws more than 25,000 attendees, features around 100 media guests, encompasses five venues in downtown Pensacola and runs hundreds of hours of programming for fans of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and other elements of fan culture. Not only a fan favorite, but Pensacon had more than $4 million economic impact to the city in 2022.

Walking down Palafox Street in the heart of downtown Pensacola, don’t be alarmed when you encounter a squadron of stormtroopers instead of our beloved Blue Angels. You could quickly duck around the corner, but you may be greeted by Freddy Krueger or Venom. Your other choice is to jump into one of the local establishments to dance with Gamora or belly up to the bar beside a creature from planet Tatooine.

You’ll find a similar, out of this world, experience at the Pensacola Intergalactic Airport. In baggage claim, you could bump into a tall, imposing and unforgiving figure using the dark side to extract his luggage from the conveyor. In the meantime, Jawas scavenge unattended bags. You might see Storm and Cyclops unbarking from the X-jet or catch Captain Kirk in the Enterprise car rental line.

It’s the ultimate cosplay of the cosmos and we encourage our passengers to travel along with us into this new FUN-tier. During the month of February, we transform the terminal into an intergalactic airport. It’s a fun customer experience created through a legend of banners, posters and column wraps which feature life-sized beings from Star Trek, Star Wars, the Marvel Universe and beyond. Not to mention, sci-fi inspired button and t-shirt collectibles to seed future visitations. 

Thanks to the locals who recreate these characters and costumes, and let us capture their images, the airport becomes a place where intelligent life and all kinds of beings throughout the universe are welcomed and discovered waiting for their spacecraft to be refueled and prepared for galaxies far, far away. 

Here on the third rock, in the category of multiple Out-of-Home installations, this campaign earned a local Gold Addy from the American Advertising Federation for District 4.