Featured Project: Watchfire Builds ‘Welcome Wall’ for Louisville Airport

Danville, Illinois-based LED sign maker Watchfire Signs was recently selected by Louisville (Kentucky) Tourism to manufacture a “Welcome Wall” at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.

The nearly 6′ x 27′ high-resolution welcome wall is viewable by the more than 4.2 million passengers who travel in and out of the airport yearly, as well as anyone visiting the airport to pick up or drop off passengers.

Louisville Tourism purchased the sign as a way to welcome convention attendees to the city, to promote tourist attractions-horse racing and bourbon tasting are two popular activities in the region-and to showcase accolades the city has received.

“The welcome wall has been a great tool for us to create excitement for Louisville and to welcome visitors to the area,” says Rosanne Mastin, marketing communications manager at Louisville Tourism. “It provides value to convention and meeting organizers because we’re able to personalize it for their events using logos and convention information.”

Mastin and two of her colleagues program the board, and she describes that process as “set and forget.”

“Programming the board is really easy,” she says. “We are able to program messages for a full month in just a few minutes, and easily schedule when we want the messages to run. If we have to make a last minute change-like swapping out a name in a message-we can do that easily.”

According to Watchfire, the new welcome wall replaces an aging sign that wasn’t working well and was difficult to program.

The airport was named after boxing legend Muhammed Ali, who was a native of the city.