Have you ever been on a long-haul flight and felt like talking to someone but the person that sat next to you wasn't exactly the chatty type???? - I think it would be great to be able to chat with other passengers on the plane right from your seat. Most of the new big planes offer personal entertainment center for each passenger where you can watch movies and play games. Adding a chat-room type feature and a personal little keyboard would provide additional entertainment....In additional the keyboard could be use to edit or type some simple "Word" documents that could be uploaded or downloaded through infrared or USB.
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Probably the best use for it would be to let customers who want to share taxis at the destination state what hotel or part of town they'll be staying at, so they could share rides. Possibly customers planning to rent a car at the destination could get together too. But this wouldn't necessarily require a chat room for this to be arranged. The airline could compile a list of destination-hotels from persons who were willing to share that information, and print out lists and hand them out.
Another way to share would be to allow fliers with an uneaten side-dish or snack offer to trade it to others. But maybe that's not a feature, it's a bug.
Virgin Atlantic has onboard chatting for passengers. It was my one and only time flying VA and it was a flight from San Francisco to Seattle. I don't know if all their planes are equipped with this but I thought it was pretty neat.
Virgin's entertainment system is very impressive .. web browsing (wasn't working yet 3 months ago), jukebox that allows you to create your own playlist, order snacks, satellite tv, order movies, and of course the chat feature.
Virgin Atlantic has this and so does Korean Airlines, but it's more seat-to-seat, there's no chat room feature yet. It would be fun also to set up a quick profile for networking.