Airlines in Portugal should reach 260 million passengers
Borders opened after two years of the pandemic and planes authorized to take off again. The skies around the world were painted with planes loaded with passengers who were sedentary from traveling and chaos was added at the airports. Last year was marked by the resumption of travel which led to a brutal recovery in national tourism with record revenues of 22 million euros. In the same sense, constraints at national airports also increased; delays and cancellations were added to the hitchhiking lack of human resources and unexpected growth.
At the various airports in the country, 63 thousand flights experienced some irregularity, affecting nine million passengers, that is, almost a third of the more than 26 million passengers who flew from Portugal, according to data collected by AirHelp for Dinheiro Alive. “Portugal is one of the countries that most tolerate irregularities in flights throughout 2022”, pointed out the lawyer specializing in the rights of air passengers of the company in Portugal, Pedro Miguel Madaleno. In total, 3,700 flights were canceled in the country – around 2% of all flights –, affecting more than 400,000 passengers. According to AirHelp, 650 thousand passengers are eligible to receive compensation under EC regulation 261/2004, which regulates the rights of air passengers on flights operated in the European Union, i.e. an increase of 14% compared to 2019, and 375% compared to 2021. With an average compensation value of around 400 euros, airlines owe customers 260 million euros.
TAP and easyJet are responsible for most of these compensations “due to the size of their activity”, explains Pedro Miguel Madaleno. AirHelp does not, however, provide detailed data on the exact number of customers hosted by company or the amount that each company will have to pay to its passengers.
When it comes to asking air carriers for responsibility, 50% of the complaints that AirHelp receives concern canceled flights, 48% refer to delays and a small slice, between 1% and 2% result from overbooking practices. July and December were the months in which national airports experienced the most disruptions, with 43.31% and 43.19% of flights accommodated, respectively.
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