Hello, welcome to Slate Money Travel. I'm Felix Salmon. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello, hello. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times.

Hello.

We are going to talk about the amount of money that people are willing to pay for basically

just like not being stuck in lines at airports, which is not just in airports.

It's also on airplanes.

This whole idea came to me when I was checking out,

when I was buying a flight on Aer Lingus, and they were like, select your seat. And all of the

seats were the same, except for the exit row. But if you ignore the exit row, all of the seats were the

same. And the price of the seats ranged quite

dramatically according to how close they were to the front of the plane. The ones near the front

are like $65, the ones at the back are free. It doesn't even matter whether it's a middle

seat or not. People really want to be at the front of the plane, and the reason people want to be at the front of the plane and the reason people want to be at the front

of the plane obviously is that they get off the plane more quickly they don't have to stand in

the aisle waiting for the people in front of them to deplane before they get to deplane

most people will probably wind up leaving the airport at basically the same time anyway

because they're going to have to wait to get their bag.

So it's not a question of getting to their destination more quickly.

It's just a question of, I want to feel like I'm moving and not just standing still.

This is a variant of the idea that a lot of people would prefer to spend a little bit more time driving in a car along back roads and spend more time getting to their destination than sitting in traffic on a freeway where they just don't move at all for 10 minutes,

even if their total journey is shorter.

And the super interesting thing about the travel instance of this is that it's monetized in a bunch of different ways.

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