Why can’t airlines pay to keep their airplane slots, without having to fly empty planes?
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The agreement of an airplane slot is usually a win-win agreement for both parties. The airline gets to collect ticket income on that route, the airport gets more passengers so they can collect passenger fees and provide additional services to the passengers and the community gets better communications with the destination community which provides more business opertunities and therefore increased income, as well as the additional income from passengers at the airport providing work for the local community. So both the airliners, airports and government is interested in these routes being flown, at least initialy. Therefore clauses are added to the contract giving the airliners exclusive access to this slot, and in return the slot may be issued to other airliners if it is not flown or there may be costly fines for not flying the route.
There might be situations where an airline wants to pay to get out of these exclusive slot contracts before time or not renew them. However in a lot of cases the routes might only be unprofitable in the short term. And the airlines do not want other airlines to get the slot. For example some routes are very seasonal, for example to a ski resort or to a beach. In this case the airline wants to keep the route operating at minimum capacity during the off-season, which also helps the community from being cut off from the world for these months. In other cases the route becomes unprofitable due to a shift in industry. A classical example is routes to typical oil producing cities which are highly profitable when the oil price is high and there is lots of activity at these locations but is not profitable when the oil price is low and the oil companies is doing anything they can to save money. But without these airliner routes the cities would become almost abandoned during these times and the oil companies might move to other locations which does have a more active airport. These routes are very important to the airlines because they provide a lot of profits when the oil price is high which helps offset the high fuel costs on the other routes. They therefore do anything they can to keep these slots even when they are not profitable. Flying a smaller aircraft when fuel prices are low for a few years is usually well worth it.
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