In the contemporary agenda of airport design, good spatial design is fundamental to properly and efficiently manage boarding and disembarking processes. It contributes to the Passenger Experience and social sustainability of the terminal itself. This correlates with higher satisfaction levels from the passenger experience. By contrast, current practices of airport design do not properly cope with its requirements and the subsequent operation phase, because the project is not associated with the complete set of stakeholder requirements including the passengers to systematic modelling and management of their experience. The airport terminal is considered a temporary production system, its focus being the transformation of travellers, aimed to maximize the value for passengers, exploiting information management to better accommodate processes and project structuring. In a lean perspective, the terminal is a "flight factory", whose layout is crucial not only for process efficiency but also to achieve higher performance and user satisfaction, the main metrics for quality service evaluation. Considering the multidisciplinary and complex features involved in airport terminal space programming, Lean Design could have important outcomes in the search for project design integration, effective solutions, quality and all-encompassing sustainability. In this paper we discuss a theoretical framework to investigate value delivery in airport terminal design through the integration of lean thinking, constituting the basis for future research on Passenger Experience.