FBO Marketing: Getting Found at the Airport and Winning the Ramp

Host: Welcome back to Off The Ground. Joey, this week we're covering FBOs — fixed base operators. For anyone who doesn't know, these are the service providers at airports that handle fuelling, parking, hangar space, and ground services for aircraft. How do FBOs typically market themselves, and what's broken about it?

Joey: The FBO market is fascinating from a marketing perspective because the traditional approach has been almost entirely offline. Airport signage. Word of mouth among pilots. Relationships with flight departments. Maybe a listing on ForeFlight or AirNav. And for a long time, that was sufficient because the market was relatively stable and pilots tended to use the same FBOs based on habit and location.

What's changed is that pilots, dispatchers, and trip planners now research FBOs online before making a decision. They're comparing services, reading reviews, checking fuel prices. And the FBOs that have invested in their digital presence are winning disproportionate market share — particularly for transient traffic, which is often the most profitable segment.

Host: So Google Business Profile must be critical for FBOs, given the location-based nature of the business?

Joey: It's the single most important digital asset for an FBO. More important than the website in many cases. When a pilot or dispatcher searches for "FBO" plus an airport identifier or city name, the map pack is the first thing that appears. And that map pack result is driven entirely by your Google Business Profile — your rating, your review count, your photos, your service descriptions.

The issue I see constantly is FBOs with incomplete profiles. Missing photos of the facility, the ramp, the lounge. No description of services. Operating hours that haven't been updated. And then across the field, a competing FBO has a fully populated profile with forty reviews, recent photos of their refurbished lounge, and posts about their new GPU service. That competitor gets the click, gets the visit, gets the fuel sale. For FBOs, Google Business Profile optimisation is the single highest-return marketing investment available.

Host: What about reviews? Pilots seem to be quite vocal about their FBO experiences.

Joey: Reviews are disproportionately influential in the FBO market. Pilots talk. They share FBO experiences on forums, on social media, in crew rooms. A single negative review about slow fuel service or an unwelcoming line crew can spread through a regional pilot community remarkably quickly.

The smart FBOs are actively managing their review profile. Encouraging satisfied pilots to leave reviews, responding professionally to negative feedback, and using reviews as genuine operational feedback. But what most FBOs miss is using reviews in their broader marketing. Featuring positive reviews on the website. Including review snippets in schema markup so they appear in search results. NATA membership and IS-BAH certification are important institutional trust signals, but for a pilot making an FBO decision during trip planning, the Google review rating often carries more immediate influence.

Host: How should FBOs think about their website? Is it secondary to the Google profile, or does it still matter?

Joey: The website absolutely still matters, particularly for corporate flight departments and charter operators evaluating an FBO for a basing decision or a preferred stop agreement. Those are higher-value relationships than transient fuel stops, and those buyers will visit the website.

The FBO website needs to answer three questions immediately. What services do you offer? What's your location and contact information? What makes you different from the FBO across the field? Most FBO websites fail on the third question. They list the same services every FBO offers — fuel, hangar, parking, lounge — without any differentiation. The FBOs that stand out online are the ones that articulate their specific advantages. Perhaps it's the only heated hangar at that airport. Or twenty-four-seven line service with a guaranteed turnaround time. Or a newly renovated passenger terminal. Those specifics are what turn a website visit into a call.

Host: Solid advice. For FBO operators wanting to take their digital presence seriously, visit offthegroundmarketing.com slash audit for a free assessment. Thanks for listening to Off The Ground. We'll see you next week.