You want to get from London to New York; do you cram yourself into an aluminium tube and blast yourself there in seven hours, arriving ragged and jet-lagged?
Or do you set aside a day and a half for the trip and fly the 5,000 kilometres in sumptuous luxury?
That's the question the people at Hybrid AirVehicles (HAV), a company based in the United Kingdom, expect to put to you before the end of the decade when their SkyCat project should be a familiar sight in the skies.
And they are not the only group of visionary engineers who are now rediscovering the potential of the airship.
A new generation of these lighter-than-air behemoths are on the drawing boards, capable of enormous range, carrying passengers in the sort of comfort last seen in the age of the luxury liner or cargo loads in hundreds, even thousands of tonnes, all without the need for huge airports and at a fraction of the fuel cost of a jet.
"Our heavy-lift and cargo vehicles will have a payload capability ranging from 20 to 200 tonnes with future development potential of up to 1,000 tonnes," says Gordon Taylor, HAV's marketing manager.
"As for the passenger variant: imagine you're with 400 of your best friends."
At Hybrid Air Vehicles the concept has already captured the interest of the United States military.
The SkyCat design's versatility plus an ability to stay airborne for 21 days and a potential lifting capacity of up to 200 tonnes have won HAV a US$517 million (Dh1.89 billion) contract in collaboration with Northrop Grumman to supply a long-endurance multi-intelligence vehicle (LemV) for deployment in Afghanistan. While the LemV is a relatively small vehicle designed for surveillance, HAV recently announced a civil customer for their heavy-lift variant.
Discovery Air Innovations of Canada (DAI) has agreed to buy a number of vehicles, capable of lifting 50 tonnes and with a speed of 185kph, to provide freight services to remote regions of the country. Construction of the first vehicles started this year with commercial service set to begin in Canada in 2014. DAI may buy up to 50 of the vehicles depending on how operations progress.
Mr Taylor says in the near future, as an airship passenger departing Britain, you could "head down to Regent's Park International in central London and board one of our vessels at 11am on a Thursday morning, then you step off on the banks of the East River in downtown New York at 3pm on Friday.
"The flight across the Atlantic has taken 30 hours so there's no jet lag," he says.
"And in between, there's been fine dining, in stately rooms, dinner dances and your own bed in your own cabin."
In California, engineers are testing the Aeroscraft, a concept made possible by advances in materials and computer control systems.
"We are resurrecting the airship with new composite fabric structures, that are stronger, lighter, more versatile" says Fred Edworthy of Aeros, the company building this particular vehicle.
Its prototype will test various key components of a design that could one day contain a hotel, casino or spa. However, the company believes its first market will be transporting freight to and from hard-to-reach locations.
"It's a new era for logistics in cargo. Transport is our first aim for these craft," says Mr Edworthy.
"It's impossible to get into some of the resource-rich areas of the world. Ecologically, you can't do it. Areas of the far north, or the Amazon are good examples."
Also, airships "give you access and much larger payloads at much lower costs", says Peter DeRobertis, the project leader for commercial hybrid air vehicles at Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics and Skunk Works division in Fort Worth, Texas.
"It's also a green aircraft; you're not polluting."
Lockheed has an airship in the works dubbed SkyTug that should be commercially available by late next year with a range of 1,000 nautical miles (1,853km) and a 20-tonne payload. Another, the 50-tonne Skyfreighter is expected to follow in late 2014.
The industry's future is initially aimed at leapfrogging the conventional cargo transport infrastructure, freighting goods where highways and airports don't exist - Canada's frozen north; China's western frontier; remote parts of Africa, Asia, and South America.
In northern Canada, for instance, about 4 million square miles of property lie north of rail lines and all-weather motorways and warming winters are making seasonally-constructed ice roads less reliable. As permafrost melts and drains away, the road slumps - an increasing problem in the rapidly warming Arctic and sub-Arctic.
"The cost of building all-weather gravel roads in northern Manitoba is $1m per kilometre," says Barry Prentice, a transport economist at the University of Manitoba. "If transport airships were available, then it would be hard to justify any roads."
Back across the Atlantic, Seymourpowell, a design and innovation company based in London, is dreaming of towering, kite-shaped airships.
Their Aircruise would stand just 45 metres below the top of the 310-metre Shard building in the UK capital, made airborne by 330,000 cubic metres of hydrogen gas, and capable of hefting 396 tonnes. Its passenger space would include penthouse apartments, bars and glass viewing floors.
"Slow is the new fast," says Nick Talbot, the design director at Seymourpowell.
"The Aircruise concept questions whether the future of luxury travel should be based around space-constrained, resource-hungry and, all too often, stressful airline travel. In a world where speed is an almost universal obsession, the idea of making a leisurely journey in comfort is a welcome contrast."
He says the Aircruise straddles the line between a cruise ship and a floating hotel and would carry up to 100 passengers with a crew of 14. Silent and pollution-free, the Aircruise combines solar power with a primary hydrogen drive for a cruising speed of about 140kph.
It can fly up to a maximum of 3,650 metres but if there are sights passengers want to see en route it can drop down to a couple of hundred metres.
Theoretically, it could ferry 100 people from London to New York in a leisurely 37 hours or Los Angeles to Shanghai in just under four days.
But the big question is whether anyone would choose to fly in these floating passenger resorts. For all their cutting-edge design and elegance, they will still only travel at about quarter of the speed of a jet.
"It will be slower than a 747, at approximately 200kph cruising speed," admits Mr Edworthy.
"But it would be the event of getting there rather than how quickly you get there."