Shared gate penalty fee

[Dokhu]

Hi

It is good to have a shared gate for free cost until you use it but I think an airport should charge a penalty fee to the airline that does not use a gate at least once a week if you have decided to keep it.

Greetings.

[POTKC]

No, it's a shared gate, thats the point. When you're not using it, other airlines can. Charging a fee for not using it would be like taxing drivers for not creating traffic jams.

[Sora]

Well, if you don't use a gate for more than a week, you should either buy more aircraft or cut down on your route network. And since other airlines can still use the gate (and pay a certain fee to the airport), I don't see the point why one airline should be penalized for not serving a particular destination over a certain time frame.

There's already enough penalty (in the form of a weekly leasing fee) for having dedicated gates and not using them often enough.

[POTKC]

OK, look: When I lease a shared gate somewhere, I lease ten of them straight away, just so I'll never have to worry about having not enough gates somewhere. Since it's paid per-use, I can have two, three, etcetera planes turnaround at one airport at the same time and not suffer reputation loss. Getting penalized for not regularly using those extra gates would be stupid, especially as not using them has no negative effects on me, the airport, or any other airline because they are shared gates, ie I am not blocking off gates and then leaving them empty for no reason.

[Dokhu]

I'm sorry my English is very limited and I can not make you to understand me well.

But think about this:

If I were the manager of an airport and an airline requests using a gate I hope that airline uses it but if it does not I can be losing money because I do not rent it to another one. I know this is hypothetical and the game is Unlimited but the fee should exist.

I think we should have a limited number of gates to be shared (really short) because we can not buy tons of gates and avoid penalties of any sort. If the game wants to penalize the airlines in some way it should not be done by creating the law and making the loophole.

Buying tons of gates is just putting a litle more work on us and it doesn't make sense to me.

[Unknown98]

Dokhu makes a good point. Is it realistic to allow airlines to simply rent, say 15 or 20 shared gates just for insurance against occasionally not having enough gates? If I only have a few flights to a particular airport each day and then request to use 10 different shared gates, I doubt the airport would approve that.

how to protect against that, I am not sure yet.

Of course one way to do this would be to add gate limits at each airport but I don't even want to think about all the potential consequences of that yet.

[skifans]

Could we have a monthly fee for shared gates as well as the per use fee? Obviously less then the dedicated gate but to discourage this?

[POTKC]

But the airport doesn't lose money if an airline doesn't use any of its gates, because the gates are shared! Others use it and pay for it. Renting many shared gates is just like telling an airport "listen, I'm only flying to you twice daily, and I'll pay for those gates, but let's just agree that if I ever have more planes land they can all get gates, and of course I'll pay for those too." There's no reason for the airport to disapprove of that. They don't lose anything, in fact they're able to get more money from an airline in this case because every time a plane lands they get paid, and they never have to worry about that airline's planes getting stuck with no gates.

Why would the airport charge a fee for this? Seriously, putting in restrictions or fees for shared gates doesn't make sense.

[Unknown98]

Yeah... and I don't know if charging a fee or a penalty is the right way to handle this. I don't think it is. When I made the shared/dedicated gate system it wasn't my intent to have airlines lease an extraordinary amount of shared gates.

I suppose in a way it's self-policing, at a certain point if you only have 1 dedicated gate and several shared gates, if you frequently begin to have multiple planes on the ground the shared gate costs add up and will be more than simply leasing a 2nd dedicated gate.

[POTKC]

Well I personally am not sure that I fly to each of my destinations more than once a day (although now that I think of it I probably do), and shared gates are better as long as you fly less than ten times a week to that airport. Up to now I've only had shared gates. Having more shared gates at your home base than aircraft is better though, because you'll never have more planes on the ground than gates, so it'll always be cheaper than paying for enough dedicated gates to have enough for one for each aircraft...