According to Glynne Shotwell, ticket costs would be less than the price of a first-class ticket on an airliner. Being able to do 12 trans-pacific flights a day rather than 2 makes a big difference for cost reduction.

IIRC the plan was for 100 passengers per launch to Mars. Assuming only Earth based point to point travel this could probably be increased as you're not also running supplies & equipment.

But assuming 100 passengers and assuming they get the launch cost down to $5MM (as proposed in the article) that is $5000/seat which is easily comparable to a first class ticket.

Further (optimistic) extrapolating with more and more Starships available, the tech becoming cheaper/more reliable as time goes on I could see that price dropping over the decades. Just as air travel changed over the years from being out of most people's reach to being routine I could see something like this supplanting planes for those ultra long haul routes.

Well, how would that work? First, it wouldn't be a starship anymore (well, not a spaceship, at least). Then, the main advantage it has being a spaceship, is that it can "coast" in space without running its engines for a long time. This advantage disappears if you were to try leveraging the ground effect.

That said, I imagine that ground effect helps a lot at low heights (like during the landing, and early ascent phase). It could probably help much more by deploying some sort of sleeve/skirt for the booster.

And I guess that if you just want to move your rocket a few hundred meters and don't care for the ground, you could leverage it as well.

Going back to the sleeve idea (which would be like a nozzle for the rocket, a chute or a flying saucer), I would like someone to run the numbers on that. And I always wondered if firing current rockets inside a cannon (or just a trench) would help with initial acceleration (as there is a pressure differential that helps, just like the ground effect).