TAP privatisation to be relaunched in September

The privatisation process for state-owned Portuguese airline TAP will be relaunched in September.

The company’s president, Luís Rodrigues insisted this week that the airline is “prepared for any scenario” but stressed the decision was a “political one” at the Air Transport Research Society – ATRS conference held at ISEG on Tuesday.

When asked when TAP would take fresh steps towards privatisation, Luís Rodrigues said that recently the Minister of Infrastructures, Miguel Pinto Luz has said “there would be news in September about TAP”.

Asked by Negócios about summer operations and possible bottlenecks because Lisbon airport is operating at full capacity, Luís Rodrigues said: “Aviation in summer is never a calm affair, but I believe we are working hard with all the stakeholders such as NAV (Air Traffic Control) and ANA (Aeroportos de Portugal) to ensure as calm a summer as possible given the constraints that we have.”

However, the TAP boss did admit that there “could be some cancellations from time to time, but things are running smoothly for now”.

When asked if TAP was to introduce a new route to China, Luís Rodrigues said it was not on the cards for the time being.

“Our strategy is to focus flights on the West (US, Canada and Latin America) but the new shareholder might have different ideas.”

In his speech at the 27th edition of the conference, he said that sustainability was one of the main issues the airline faced, but stressed there was an incorrect perception about the aviation industry’s impact on emissions which were only 2.5%, but had no doubt about the urgency for the sector to achieve net zero emissions “as quickly as possible”.

When quizzed about introducing clean green fuel rates on passenger tickets to offset the increased costs of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), which could add up to an extra €70 onto the price of tickets, Luís Rodrigues said there were no plans to do so for the time being.

Recently, Lufthansa announced that from 2025 it would add a surcharge of between €1 and €72 per ticket to cover the additional costs of meeting new environmental regulations.
Currently, EU regulations require airlines to use at least 2% SAF from 2025.