ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal said that Ryanair’s announcement that it will end flights to the Azores is a “surprise”, revealing that “recent conversations” were “oriented towards increasing, not reducing” the offer.
Ryanair will close all flights to the Azores from March 2026, citing high airport taxes and “the Government’s inaction”, the low-cost airline announced this Thursday, 20th.
Questioned by Lusa, an official ANA source highlighted that “Ryanair’s statement comes as a surprise, with recent conversations with the Irish company aimed at increasing, not reducing, its flight offer to Ponta Delgada”.
The group, owned by French company Vinci, said that “the airport taxes in force in the Azores, the lowest in the network” remained unchanged in 2025, “with ANA not proposing any increase for 2026”.
According to the concessionaire, “this cost reduction in real terms (that is, removing the effect of inflation) cannot therefore justify the company’s change in position”.
ANA also said that it maintains an open dialogue with Ryanair “to identify, in addition to the company’s known communication positioning, what the new contextual elements may have been”.
Furthermore, the company “maintains close collaboration with the Regional Government of the Azores and tourism entities to ensure the best air connectivity” to and from the region, “with Ryanair and other operators”.
The group recalled that the routes operated by Ryanair, between Ponta Delgada, Lisbon and Porto are also operated by SATA and TAP.
Ryanair announced today “that it will cancel all flights to/from the Azores from March 29, 2026, due to high airport taxes (set by French airport monopoly ANA) and the inaction of the Portuguese Government, which increased air navigation fees by +120% post-Covid and introduced a travel tax of two euros, at a time when other European Union (EU) states are abolishing travel taxes to ensure capacity growth, which It’s scarce.”
The company argues that “unfortunately, the ANA monopoly has no plan to increase low-cost connectivity with the Azores”, adding that ANA “faces no competition in Portugal – which has allowed it to make monopoly profits by increasing Portuguese airport fees without any penalty – at a time when competing airports in other EU countries are reducing fees to stimulate growth”.
Ryanair argues that the Government “must intervene and ensure” that national airports – “a critical part of the national infrastructure, especially in an island region like the Azores – serve to benefit the Portuguese people and not a French airport monopoly”.
Therefore, they consider that the competitiveness of more remote European regions such as the Azores is being harmed by what they call the EU’s anti-competitive environmental taxes.
“Or YOU ARE [sistema de comércio de emissões] from the EU only applies to intra-European flights, while longer-haul, more polluting flights to the US and the Middle East are excluded. Instead of making European aviation more competitive (by reducing the ETS), the EU expanded the ETS to cover remote regions like the Azores – exempting non-EU competitors like Turkey and Morocco. Ryanair again calls on Ursula von der Leyen to ensure a level playing field on EU environmental fees by immediately bringing ETS fees to levels equivalent to CORSIA [o esquema de compensação e redução de carbono para a aviação internacional que se aplica aos voos de e para países terceiros]”, they say.