I dunno, I might try them as an impulse purchase if they were in the airport and I could just drop them at the other end of my flight and pay $10-15.

I'm in the flight frequency where doing that occasionally would work out better than buying, or pretty close to it. Plus, specifically for the Bose since they are bulky, there's the whole not having to pack them and carry for the whole trip angle. That's worth something (maybe not enough, but something) even to those flying more often.

You have to remember, the really frequent flyers around here wouldn't be the target for this. They would own their NC headphones because they're on a plane so much that any kind of rental would not be cost effective. But I do think there's a possible market here to the infrequent flyer.

But to make this work I really think it has to be airport pickup/dropoff. Don't want to have to plan in advance, mail order the things and have to ship them back. Way too much hassle; I'd never even bother, and neither, I suspect, would too many other people, especially not with such a high threshhold. The airport pickup/dropoff allows for something that could be done at a low enough price point to sell rentals to infrequent flyers. There's a huge chicken and egg issue with infrastructure for this, though. Plus, there's a hurdle getting people to see what a big difference it makes. It'll need an intro price of $5 perhaps, and/or a way to test listen and simulate the noise cancelling effect.