New headache for TAP in (slow) take off for re-privatisation
Portugal’s flagship airline TAP has a new headache on the horizon: it faces paying out compensation to 130,000 passengers for delayed and cancelled flights.
The airline in the excruciatingly slow process of being sold only recently heard that it faces compensating over 1,000 former employees due to ‘illegal contracts’ – with the bill for that potentially running into the tens of millions of euros.
Now, this new curved ball, which could add another €52 million to the financial pain.
Says SIC Notícias today, Portugal is one of the European countries with the highest number of delayed flights, “and TAP heads the list of five airlines with the heaviest bills to pay clients” (in compensation).
Data from the AirHelp portal shows that in 2024, 34 million passengers travelled from Portuguese airports. Of the almost 12 million who suffered some kind of disruption, more than 630,000 are entitled to compensation.
When it comes to TAP, 130,000 of those passengers will have been flying with the airline.
“Anyone affected by a flight disruption – cancellation, delay of more than three hours or denied boarding due to overbooking (when companies sell more tickets than seats available for a given flight) – has the right to compensation under the terms of the European regulation,” Pedro Miguel Madaleno, from AirHelp Portugal, a lawyer specialising in passenger rights, tells the media station
Bearing in mind that the average amount of compensation is around €400, all in all it means that TAP could end up paying €52 million to the passengers affected – but (and this is a big but) “it is not always an easy process to get this money”, warns SIC. This is where organisations like AirHelp can make all the difference, as they try to live up to their name, helping people who have experienced problems in the air.
SIC stresses that the time limit for requesting compensation is three years, which gives passengers time to ‘get help’ to ensure their rights to compensation.
Considering the government is keen to privatise TAP, or at least sell a sizeable share of the company, the question today could be ‘where are all these TAP-negative stories coming from?’ and ‘who will be benefitting?’
TAP was returned to state control by PS Socialists in 2020 in a deal that cost the Portuguese taxpayers around €3.2 billion. Prime minister at the time, António Costa, admitted later that it was extremely unlikely that the state would ever recoup the money spent, even in an eventual re-privatisation.
