Idle Slot Fees

Charge for unused slots at an airport. If you use one or 5 slots, it still represents one gate. And a lot of gates are being used for only one slot, thereby consuming the availible number of gates at popular airports.

There are numerous ways to institute this depending on what the objective is. For example, if you want to affect feeder airlines, then there will be an economic cost to owning a gate an not flying it.

One scenario, allow one idle slot but charge for any more idle slots.

Charge on a sliding scale, no charge for airports with more than 10 availble gates, a small charge for airports with 0-10 and a large charge for airports with 0 (maybe sliding with the gate fee).

The objective is to pay for idle resources in a scarcity environment.

I don't think this will work as long as we cannot rent individual slots.

I set up most my routes in such a way that they are efficient enough for my purposes, but not too frequent (frequency set to 3 or 4, depending on time available on planes). That would mean I would be paying more, while my routes get less efficient per frequency and, as a result, my profit goes down (because I am forced to do this to prevent being fined).

Now, if we were renting individual slots, with a few over-flow, yes.. We would be paying the charge in the form of the monthly costs for the slots, but not using them.

Additionally: You pay the price for 5 slots. If players choose to use only 1, that is their good right, but I doubt very much this is the most economic option.