What a broken and unethical system. Again, no one held accountable, all in the name of business.
It's also not feasible to switch carriers too often, as the carriers need some amount of infrastructure of their own, time to fold in service/schedules, local employees or contractors, etc. Some airports now have common use gate terminals, networks, kiosks...that helps, but it's only a small percentage of them.
I'm sure there's a better system for how things are now, but I think it was set up with the right ideas in mind at the time.
I'm absolutely certain they would. Monopolies are incredibly profitable, after all, and a repeatable strategy for killing off all newcomers is step zero.
I.e., that government rule was created to address a rational but pathological behavior in a market.
Lufthansa could always not fly those routes. But then the business would lose money to fines, possibly lose gates, and maybe go bankrupt.
So, yes, in the name of the business. And of course that business's behavior is completely predictable.
Anyways.
Pointing fingers at isms is a waste of time. Businesses operate in markets. Markets are human inventions. Especially in the case of something like an airline, a Market is a Market in the Stock Market sense not in the Bazaar sense.
The question is: how do we modify market rules without re-introducing the aforementioned pathology?
Which is a REALLY hard question! The simplest solution, from a market perspective, might be charging a fair price for carbon, such that this sort of behavior is no longer rational. Of course, that's a non-started politically, so... here we are.
But anyways you “stop pointing fingers” is funny when it’s literally a government rule creating this mess.
seems pretty obvious? drop the flight requirements when covid lockdowns are on and flight volume is low, then when flight volume picks up reinstate it. It's not rocket science.
The problem is that the EU is requiring using X% of flight slots (reduced due to Covid), but those flights aren't actually running due to low demand, so empty flights are used to hit X%.
If they simply reduced X%, then they could run fewer flights.
Or you disagree?