That is generally interpreted to include the cost of rental, fuel and landing fees etc., but with no contribution towards maintenance or insurance.
I am not aware of that old chestnut ever having been clarified, bookworm. I think one needs to read the law exactly as written. If the CAA wished to exclude say 50hr checks and the engine fund, their lawyers could have drafted it thus. There is no case law
AFAIK on this. Both are unquestionably "direct costs".
On the human-factors side, I would strongly advise you not to put yourself in a position in which you must make a flight to get to a meeting. Leave sufficient time that you can take alternative transport. You may find that constraint quite limiting or inefficient.
Of course that's the other side of it.
Much has been written here on that too.
Doing formal customer visits is hard using GA, because
- most airports close too early so flying tends to force a hotel stay (which can actually be quite nice, but not if you then spend £200 on taxi fares which are a huge ripoff everywhere)
- most airports do not have instrument approaches, so the despatch rate is poor (cancelling due to destination out, or destination coming back, or both) and hey this opens up the fascinating topic of DIY letdowns
- most
British customers, being British, would be jealous of anybody doing well, i.e. of a plane, and don't want to subsidise you expensive hobby, so you have to conceal the fact, and if you cannot then you have to say "I just rented it for the day" and generally play it down (been there, done that, many times). This means you cannot fly unless arrival is assured, which it won't be unless the wx is perfect, which means you often end up driving
That said, there are some spectacular cases where it can work very well, against road transport. I used to fly to Welshpool (4-8hrs' drive) in 1hr.
Obviously visiting suppliers is better than visiting customers. You don't give a **** what the supplier thinks of your plane or your expensive hobby. Or visiting trade shows, and other events where nobody cares if you turn up or not.
One needs a structure for making clear go/no-go decisions. This is almost not at all taught in the PPL, where they instead feed you stupid proverbs like better to be down and wishing you were up than ....