Airport charges peak/offpeak
I note that some slot-controlled airports in the UK, particularly around London, are extremely busy for some hours of the day, but have ample slots available at off-peak times.
I note also that London City has a charging structure that strongly encourages airlines to fly at off peak times. London City having a small land area is particularly constrained as to its capacity to handle spikes in the number of aircraft at certain times of day, meaning it has to enforce a time-influenced charging structure. I've noticed how airfare partly reflects how much more it costs to fly to/from Heathrow / City compared to Luton / Stansted and modified the flights I book to save a bit of cash accordingly.
I note as well that some other airports are very close to passenger capacity at peak times, but could happily handle some more flights at off peak times - Luton being a possible example. I note as well that these airports often have relatively few time-weighted charging bands - it seems to be either peak or it's off peak. I realise that demand in November will never match July, but on a leisure route, a 10 am departure is a close substitute for 7 am for price sensitive passengers.
While different charging bands for every hour of the day would be absurd, what is there to stop UK airports from changing their charging policy so as to have maybe 5 different bands of the day with different airport charges ?
Essentially, an airport would apply the principles of yield management to airport fees at different slots much more aggressively than currently happens. Perhaps also some sort of "fuzzy timeband" so that an aircraft due to land at 7 pm is permitted to land 30 mins either side 15% of the days in a season without being penalised, so as to avoid aircraft circling when they should be on the ground. It seems like a possible way of squeezing in quite a few more revenue-generating flights+passenger, without incurring infrastructure or staffing costs.
2 side effects would be
- the creation of a tradeable market for slots at semi-full airports
- slot constrained airports would gain some influence on slot usage instead of ACL having control
(Well-argued and thoughtful) comments and opinions on a postcard...
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 22nd Jan 2014 at 00:36.