I thought that airship exploration took premade parties of whatever size, and dumped them into the islands with several other completely random parties? So if you enter with only 2 or 3 people, your group would only consist of those people, but you could potentially interact with the other random groups? In that case, I don't see why you would want to kick anyone in your group, and you obviously can't kick anyone from a rival group.

I didn't follow the exploration explanation too closely though, because I'm more interested in seeing it first hand tomorrow.