[NickRandom]

An added advantage of using that approach is that as you drop off cargo (or use up food, water and fuel supplies for multi-day passenger trips) you can siphon off some of those cells to power the propulsion motors and thereby increase your effective range.

[ant6n]

That multi-day passenger trip would also require the dropping of „cargo“ to make the airship lighter.

[NickRandom]

Indeed. Or you could arrange for waste (water, effluent, waste food) to be dropped down over a pre-selected area for ground crews to pick up). In other words something like thick mylar bags dropped via drogue chutes as the journey progressed with replacement mylar bags (or similar) carried on board. Just pure spit-balling a day after your reply but a mid-point replenishing stage for food and water (for the passenger flights) would make sense especially for something like an 'Across America' flights across the US diagonal from the Atlantic North-East side to Pacific South West side (eg depart Boston destination San Diego or New York to Los Angeles).

North to South because the air would go from colder to warmer rather than from warm air to colder air if done in the opposite direction and the reasons for a diagonal course is because it would cover a lot more 'interesting sights to see from the air' for a multi-day 'air cruise' type cruise (best way to explain that is a literal air-cruise as in a sea-cruise).

For a passenger trip it would have to be an extremely HNV costing (passenger cost/ticket price paid * weight able to be carried) but do-able for say 4 - 7 passengers but Cargo would be the way to go for the bread-and-butter stuff because A) The weights and destinations are pre-known and optimised and B) Going on a diagonal route would beat road and rail delivery speeds and provide some financing to the back-haul of getting the (now empty) air-ships back to the departure point.

[Edit To Update]: Ughh! you can tell I'm not a pilot because cold air is better than hot air in terms of aircraft lifting capacities so South to North would be better and maybe a change of route from Miami to Seattle would also work out ok in terms of shipping ports that intersect with cruise ship ports.

[Double Edit, Sorry]: On second thoughts, North to South for passengers and South To North for cargo is better because cargo is low margin so would need the greater lifting capacity. Or not.... Like I said, pure spit-balling!