The current study presents a review of the airport literature, covering 222 articles published from 1985 to 2022. The review identifies the key drivers of airport performance and summarises the bibliographic information for the last 37 years. The review identifies 8 major categories: Traffic Indicators, service Quality indicators, commercial indicators, Economic indicators, environmental indicators, competitive indicators, safety and security indicators and social indicators. In addition to providing various drivers of profitability, the review provides information on publication trends, the evolution of the topic, three fields plot, profound authors and sources of publication. The review fills the gap by presenting the most important performance indicators since the previous literature focuses on the efficiency of airports.