United option to reserve armrests

Good morning everyone. Hope your weekend is off to a wonderful start.

Tomorrow I’ll be flying across the country once again. While I’m not particularly excited about the journey, the destination is quite exciting (but more on that another time).

As I was going through the process of booking travel I was once again reminded of the painful parts of travel. One aspect of flying I find particularly strange is the armrests. According to Google, the unspoken expectation is that the armrest is a shared space between seat-mates.

Realistically, the person who is smaller in stature typically yields to the larger party, or sometimes you want to be as far away from the person next to you as possible, and using an armrest loses all appeal. I’ve experienced many different dynamics when flying the “friendly” skies.

As airlines search high and low for new ways to extract revenue from their customers, I started to wonder… what if you could simply reserve your armrests for a fee? To add an extra layer of visibility and competition, your seatmates would get a notification and they could outbid you for the space if they wanted to.

This is one of those ideas that primarily highlights the painful realities of flying, but I can also see people who are desperate being willing to pay for this.

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