Skift Take
While guest traffic at Portuguese airports in the very first 4 months of the year went beyond pre-pandemic levels, the nation’s flag carrier is yet to collect momentum.
Amrita Ghosh
Portugal’s state-owned airline TAP brought 7.58 million travelers in the first half of this year, a 30% increase from a year ago however still a little below pre-pandemic levels even as tourist numbers have currently gone beyond those seen in 2019.
Still, the state-owned carrier, which the federal government plans to partially privatize, said on Monday that global routes to Brazil, North America and Africa carried 2.17 million passengers in the period, 14.7% more than in the very first half of 2019.
That, it stated in a declaration, “demonstrated the strong recovery of the business,” although the total traveler traffic fell 4% shy of the exact same period in 2019 as the airline company’s flights within Europe, consisting of mainland Portugal and islands– brought fewer guests.
TAP is undergoing a restructuring under a Brussels-approved 3.2 billion euro ($3.51 billion) rescue plan, however the government wants to release its privatization as early as this month while meaning to keep a strategic stake.
At least 3 significant international carriers– IAG, Lufthansa, and Air France-KLM– have actually up until now revealed interest in TAP. The Portuguese airline company reported a net loss of 57.4 million euros in the first quarter of this year, which represented more than a 50% drop from the loss in the previous year’s period, due to increasing guest numbers.
(Reporting by Patrícia Vicente Rua; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Paul Simao)
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