Spirit Airlines

I was recently fortunate in receiving another commission for the Los Angeles Times' Business section cover. This time around, Derek was looking for an image to accompany an article about the questionable business practices of Spirit Airlines. The commentary begins with how Spirit maintains low, affordable rates as well as how they are a fast-growing business, and then it delves into how the company seems to "nickel and dime" their passengers with numerous expensive fees such as charging $10 to print a boarding pass and $25 to bring a carry-on bag with you. Since the fees and low-cost/bad-service trade-off seemed to be the main focus of the article, I focused on that aspect in most of my sketches:

1: Visualizing the fast-growth but dropping customer satisfaction of the airline.
2: The article utilized an interview with the airline owner which made me visualize him as a Kong-esque figure manhandling planes (and the figures within :)

3: The "squeeze" that the airline puts on its customers.
4: Similar to #1, another visual of the positives and negatives of the airline.

I really liked #4 with perhaps the bottom plane flipped and traveling right/left. Unfortunately, none of these ideas seemed to fit into the art director's idea of a visual for the article. He asked that we focus on the unfair fees, and so I whipped up two more thumbnails based on the concept of a "shakedown;" I figured that out of the six ideas we would be able to start a dialogue of how we should focus our concepts:

1: Fees as a shakedown at the ticket counter.
2: Shaking down passengers "in-flight."

Derek liked the last idea of shaking the plane, and I happily worked up this final sketch for him:

Final layout:

I think some of these may make for fun personal projects in the future. I know I have certainly felt like the ticket desk has turned me upside down a few times in the past, and it is bound to happen again! Thanks for reading!

Enjoy the Day,
Chris