Visualizing Airfare
August 2008Featured in Cartography Design Annual #2 (2009)
Runner-up, 2008 Arthur Robinson Award for Best Printed Map
Honorable Mention, NACIS 2009 Student Map & Poster Competition
Anyone who has booked a flight probably knows that the cost is not necessarily proportional to the distance traveled. The question, then, is: how does it vary spatially? I put this map together to show the answer for one airline at one airport on one week. I collected fares for all 100+ direct international flights on British Airways out of Heathrow airport in London, interpolated a global surface, and threaded isolines.
Arguably, this is the wrong symbolization technique. Airfare doesn’t vary continuously across the surface of the globe. Only a few points have airfares — you can’t fly to middle of the Pacific Ocean, for example. But if I had chosen a more conventional symbolic technique, such as a proportional symbol, I think the wide empty spaces would have dominated the map too much. Isolines help keep the data up front, as well as provide a more visually interesting presentation,
Fun fact: if you look at the map from a distance, or squint, you can see a really interesting light and shadow effect.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac7e637ca75abbda0ca9383c2ce3e1fe7dce1ff9e4b160e8013efc0ddb3551a0/2019-Portfolio-Version_Artboard-3.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/783ba236bf711c5694ee08eb0c38027d35445714d0d31c37a48836950cfa1d05/VA-Detail-1.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/320d91eaaa3378d264356320cd01c5a24058eecc9da77777e6f44c140895dd97/VA-Detail-2.jpg)