Starting an Airline

That has been repeatedly established, and there are very strong reasons why people with very limited time still travel a lot of hours to conduct their business.

Not everyone is the same, but it is the norm rather than the exception.

http://www.iacconline.org/content/files/WhyFace-to-FaceBusin...

From the paper: "From a psychological perspective there are a number of positive features about faceto-face meetings that cannot always be achieved as well via other forms of communication.

Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and nonverbal behavioral styles not captured in most computer mediated communication devises. There are nuances associated with hand gestures, voice quality and volume, facial expressions, and so forth that are simply not captured in email discussion, chat rooms, and the like. Even videoconferencing does not capture all of the dynamics of group members (e.g. the expression of others while one member is talking, etc.).

A further advantage of face-to-face meetings is that they occur in “real time” as opposed to non-synchronized time. Computer mediated communications often are delayed because of a variety of reasons, not always received, and sometimes disrupted because of technical problems.

Another feature is simply the fact that face-to-face business meetings provide human contact among members. Human contact is a primitive need among human beings.

We are social creatures and isolation is harmful. A recent article in the New Yorker magazine8 discussed the impact of social isolation and concluded that “simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people” (p. 36). There is much psychological research affirming this proposition—that individuals need personal contact with others to satisfy deep primitive psychological needs. Face-toface business meetings help meet these needs. Emailing and even teleconferences are not as likely to meet these needs, notwithstanding the enormous popularity of Facebook which basically provides electronic connections between social “friends”. However, the popularity of this website suggests that people might be even hungrier for social friends than can be satisfied in their present day-to-day work and personal lives.

Similarly, business meetings allow participants opportunities to develop important exchange relationships among themselves. These exchanges can be in the form of business negotiations, personal favors, promises, understandings, etc. that cannot often be achieved via other forms of communication because of their personal and informal nature. One psychological theory that emphasizes this notion is “social exchange theory” where human relations are viewed as an exchange of rewards among individuals or achieving equity between “what you put in” compared to “what you get out” of relationships."

http://www.forbes.com/forbesinsights/Business_Meetings_FaceT...

http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/globaltravel-face

There is, sort of. It's easy to look at the interior of, say, a 737 and conclude there are only two or three "classes" (economy and first, and possibly some sort of premium-rate economy with extra legroom), but fare-wise there's enormous variation.

On -- to take an example legacy carrier -- United, the "economy" cabin is actually made up of fourteen different fare classes. Deciding how many seats to offer in each fare class on a given instance of a given flight on a given day is a stupendously complex task which largely gets hidden from the customer (for completeness' sake, "first class" and "business class", on planes which have them, have three additional fare classes each).

A big part of it is that there's more to it than just the seat, which is obvious since all those different "economy" fare classes end up in the same or very similar physical things-to-sit-on. The number of factors, though, is frighteningly large.

For example, your origin and ultimate destination factor into the fare, as do whether it's one-way or round-trip, and how far in advance you booked, and whether you wanted a refundable ticket, and whether it was booked by a corporate travel department on your behalf, and whether it was a seat offered to third-party travel-booking and search sites, and what day of week and time of day the flight is operating, and whether it's a seasonal offer to a popular vacation destination, and... that's the tip of the iceberg.