Almost isometric ideals in Banach spaces

A natural class of ideals, almost isometric ideals, of Banach spaces is defined and studied. The motivation for working with this class of subspaces is our observation that they inherit diameter 2 properties and the Daugavet property. Lindenstrauss spaces are known to be the class of Banach spaces that are ideals in every superspace; we show that being an almost isometric ideal in every superspace characterizes the class of Gurariy spaces.