Lisbon, Nov. 20, 2025 (Lusa) - ANA - Aeroportos de Portugal said that Ryanair's announcement that it will end flights to the Azores is a "surprise", revealing that "recent talks" were "orientated towards increasing, not reducing" supply.
Ryanair will end all flights to the Azores from March 2026, citing high airport charges and "government inaction", the low-cost airline announced on Thursday.
Questioned by Lusa, an official ANA source emphasised that "Ryanair's statement comes as a surprise, as recent talks with the Irish company have been geared towards increasing, not reducing, its flights to Ponta Delgada".
ANA, owned by French company Vinci, said that "the airport charges 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 (i.e. removing the effect of inflation) cannot therefore justify the company's change of position".
ANA also said that it is maintaining an open dialogue with Ryanair "to identify, in addition to the company's known communication positioning, what the new contextual details might have been".
In addition, the company "maintains close collaboration with the Regional Government of the Azores and tourism organisations to ensure the best air connectivity" to and from the region, "with Ryanair and other operators".
The group pointed out that SATA and TAP also operate the Ryanair routes between Ponta Delgada, Lisbon, and Porto.
Ryanair announced today “that it will cancel all flights to/from the Azores from 29 March 2026, due to high airport charges (set by French airport monopoly ANA) and the inaction of the Portuguese government, which has increased air navigation charges by +120% post Covid and introduced a €2 travel tax, at a time when other European Union (EU) states are abolishing travel taxes to ensure that capacity is in short supply”.
The company said that "unfortunately, the ANA monopoly has no plan to increase low-cost connectivity to the Azores", adding that ANA "faces no competition in Portugal, which has allowed it to make monopoly profits by increasing Portuguese airport charges without any penalty, at a time when competing airports in other EU countries are cutting charges 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".
Thus, they believe that the competitiveness of more remote European regions, such as the Azores, is being jeopardised by what they call anti-competitive EU environmental taxes.
"The EU's ETS [emissions trading system] only applies to intra-European flights, while more polluting long-haul flights to the US and the Middle East are excluded. Instead of making European aviation more competitive (by reducing the ETS), the EU has expanded the ETS to cover remote regions such as the Azores – exempting non-EU competitors such as Turkey and Morocco. Ryanair once again calls on Ursula von der Leyen to ensure that the EU's environmental levies are a level playing field by immediately bringing ETS rates to levels equivalent to those of CORSIA [the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation that applies to flights to and from third countries]," they said.
ALN/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
