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Passengers’ preference and origin location data (home postcodes) can be extremely useful for marketing purposes, with the potential for more effective customer segmentation and targeting, yet traditional airport market research has often neglected these aspects. This paper utilises passenger survey data from the Gold Coast Airport in the state of Queensland, Australia, to perform a geo-demographic classification analysis in conjunction with census data. With geo-coded passenger preference data, the trip characteristics and airport decision preferences were cross-compared with demographic data with socio-economic variables. The results revealed distinctive contrasts in passenger origin location for short-haul domestic trips and long-haul international trips, in which passengers from afar are willing to travel longer distances to reach a second-tier airport to make use of cheaper airfares. One of the implications of this study is that low-cost carriers’ businesses (the airlines or the airports) should better target their customers by offering geographically targeted marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]