TAP announces 15% growth rate with 2023 results

TAP Air Portugal is reporting that in 2023 it carried 15.9 million passengers—2.1 million more than the previous year—which is equivalent to a growth of 15.2 per cent.

Load factor was 80.8 per cent, 0.8 percentage points more than in 2022, an improvement of 0.7 points compared to 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. RPK (Revenue Passenger Kilometres, an indicator of aviation productivity) increased 16 per cent from 2022, and up 1.4 per cent from 2019.

Long haul numbers up

On its long-haul routes, TAP carried 4.6 million passengers carried—15.1 per cent more than in 2022—which represents an increase of 9.8 per cent compared to 2019.

On its Canada and U.S. routes, TAP carried 1.46 million passengers, 18.4 per cent more than in 2022 and 39.5 per cent more than in 2019. On routes to Brazil, the total number of passengers carried was more than 1.9 million, an increase of 20.3 per cent compared to 2022 and 8.4 per cent compared to 2019.

On the routes to the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira, TAP carried 1.5 million passengers last year, 13.2 per cent more than in 2022 and 5.7% more than in 2019.

Pre-pandemic levels not yet reached

All of TAP’s network segments saw growth compared to 2022. However, compared to 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, TAP still hasn’t fully recovered the same level of traffic on the mainland Portugal, Europe and Africa routes.

This means that the company, in total numbers, is still seven percent below the total number of passengers carried in 2019, before the pandemic.

It should be noted, though, that TAP now operates with fewer aircraft and has fewer slots at Lisbon airport compared to 2019, due to the impositions of the Restructuring Plan defined by the European Commission, to which the company is still subject until 2025.

This winter, TAP is offering more than 1,050 flights weekly to 80 cities in 30 countries through its network of destinations, comprising 10 in North America, 12 in Central and South America, 13 in Africa and the Middle East and 45 in Europe (including six in Portugal).

From North America, TAP offers 77 weekly flights; 60 from seven airports in the USA (New York’s JFK, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco and Washington-Dulles) to Portugal (Lisbon and Porto), 12 flights from Canada’s Toronto and Montreal and five flights from Cancun, in Mexico, to Lisbon.