This paper takes the top ten airports identified in the SKYTRAX 2011 airport awards and investigates to what extent their success might be due to creative and innovative management actions. The literature review considers factors such as historical development, geographical location, ownership structure and role of the airport. It uses publicly available qualitative and quantitative data to identify factors that may have contributed to their success and presents a conceptual model. This research demonstrates there is evidence for each of the factors proposed in the model. However in this exploratory study there was little uniformity in terms of the relative success in the awards. The paper recommends that further empirical research is carried out to test the strength and direction of relationships between factors.