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> According to The National, German airline Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports.

This is scandalous.

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The airlines should be allowed to pay a fee equivalent to the cost of running the flight (or slightly less), rather than having to actually fly an empty plane.

But then competitors would say that they would've paid a higher fee, in order to take those slots.

So in the end, there would be some bidding, and the cost of those slots would increase to their actual value, which removes the worth of those slots.

It "solves" the problem, but the airline who currently own the slot do not like this solution.

If the competitor thought they could actually fill the flights, they could probably offer slightly less. Passengers probably represent a net profit for airports, so an airline sitting on slots and not using them represents an opportunity cost.

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