"Late update penalty" on a slot
Hello all. This morning, about to operate a first wave flight from home base, we were delayed by a baggage system failure in the terminal which meant us missing our slot by about 2 minutes. I called our company operations to inform them we wouldn't be able to be airborne for CTOT+10mins, gave them a new EOBT and asked them if they could sort us a new slot accordingly. Very shortly afterwards, the ops controller replied saying we had been given a new slot an hour later because a "late update penalty" had been applied.
I've never heard of this before and, without knowing about the inner workings of Eurocontrol in much detail, it seems absolutely absurd that a punitive delay can be imposed due to missing a slot for reasons outside our control. Issues like this happen - nothing can be done about it. I work for one of the biggest LCCs in Europe, who must pay millions in Air Traffic Services fees every year, and it doesn't seem right that an arbitrary delay can be casually applied to a customer for no reason other than an unfortunate occurrence way down the chain.
I'm interested to know if I really understood this properly. I can understand if the system was at capacity and a long slot delay was necessary, but this morning it improved by over half an hour as soon as we sent a "ready" message and the airspace did not appear "busy" (although I acknowledge this isn't exactly a scientific analysis.) Were we really punished simply for letting Eurocontrol know we'd missed our slot by a couple of minutes at the last second?
And if so - why?