Fellow Vet, airline pilot, military pilot and RE Agent on the Southeast side of Houston.

I would likely favor a local hop on commuter airline. 

I don't think you'll be missing something with either choice. 99% of what I end up doing is with pretty basic stuff: e-mail, browser, maps, flashlight app (amazingly handy), camera, weather apps, calendar, productivity (pages, numbers, and keynote, the iOS equivalents to word, excel and powerpoint), calculator, kindle app, iBooks (mostly to capture .pdf documents), banking apps (from your bank), open table (restaurant reservations), trip advisor app (handy for finding stuff near you, though the map apps are pretty good at this, too), airline apps (flight status, online checkin), clock (haven't used a watch in years, also for timers, stopwatch, and alarm functions), pandora, fandango, flash seats (concert tickets), and a few others.These phones are really handy when traveling.

Companies are laying off employees as tourism, sports venues, hospitality industry, airlines and others all take major hits.

It would shut down retail, restaurants, car dealerships, airlines...

Every person who tells me they're making a killing, then I look at their booking calendar and they seem to have a couple of weekends book for the next two months and lots of weekdays available.So I would look at some of your competition to see how full they're staying.Of course one shot in time is not 100% accurate...maybe everyone tends to book same day or last minute, so looking a month out you would not see bookings.Hotels and airlines seem to want about 80% occupancy, apartments around 95% occupancy to stay profitable.   

Let prospective investors know that you have succeeded at something. 2) 3rd party validation is key - We were able to use news articles, travel websites and new airline routes as collateral information to prove to investors that what we are saying about our market, others without a vested interest are corroborating. 

Everything from the weather to cancelled events to airline prices to gas prices and seasons and tons of other factors I'm leaving out, affect your income.

I only use airline cards to get the welcome bonus. 

I have friends who are airline pilots who had to go through the hell of commuter airlines and crashpads while building time.