Purpose - This paper aims to propose and assess a core set of environmental and operational sustainability indicators for airport benchmarking, based on research conducted for a decision support tool designed to support airport environmental and operational sustainability. Seeks to make recommendations on the external use of sustainability indicators in stakeholder communication, based on a separate survey of the way in which UK airports use environmental and sustainability benchmarking reports. Design/methodology/approach - The indicators are designed to minimise additional data collection demands while reflecting sustainability theory to a practicable extent. Findings - Bringing core environmental and operational indicators together helps to make their inter-relationship explicit. The indicators are a minimum set, and their limitations with respect to sustainability are made explicit. Originality/value - Reports on a survey of the current extent of, and approaches to, stakeholder communication undertaken by airports in the UK, particularly external use of environmental and sustainability benchmarking results.