The president of Portugal’s Hotels Association (Associação da Hotelaria) says he is concerned about Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport’s capacity to deal with processing passengers this summer.
Bernardo Trindade, says that constraints at the airport near Portela, throws up “huge challenges” and fears that passenger processing operations could suffer in the peak holiday season.
The list of infrastructure challenges faced by Portugal’s airports is significant, including the new automised passport control European Entry/Exit system (EES) for non-EU passengers which caused huge queues when it was rolled out from October 2026.
The government has suspended the system until the end of next month following the chaos at the airports which saw some people lose their flights and even cases of fisticuffs and heated arguments in the queues from over-anxious passengers.
Now Bernardo Trindade fears that once the suspension of the system is over, the queues could start to become intolerably lengthy again.
“We are aware of the effort the government has made to help with the mobilisation of GNR agents to join the permanent staff of agents at airports. We are aware of the effort ANA has made to find space for more bays, but the challenge is enormous.
We now have a new handling concessionaire at mainland airports. So many open questions, namely union issues, and the deadline for the replacement is scheduled for May,” he listed this Wednesday, during his speech at the opening session of the 35th AHP Congress taking place in Porto.
The sum of the challenges suggests another chaotic summer at Portela Airport. “I’m really worried about the high season. There are too many patchwork solutions for the same infrastructure,” he lamented.
The president of the AHP (Portuguese Hotel Association) stressed the need to find solutions, also warning of the need to study the burden on cities.
“We are proponents of a market economy, but when demand is constrained by the airport, more hotels in densely populated areas means having the same number of people distributed among more hotels.
We said this in Lisbon where, with the airport saturated, according to consultants we will need 45 more hotels by 2028; we say this in Porto, where by 2028 we will have more than 35 new hotels.
The 17 million passengers at Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport, while not representing saturation, require us to look at the current infrastructure,” he warned.
Source: Diario de Notícias
Picture: ksvrbrg, Flickr
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