Brazil’s Azul and Dubai’s Emirates are expected to make a return to Porto, the gateway to northern Portugal, in 2024, according to the head of a local tourism association.
The information was revealed by Luís Pedro Martins, president of Turismo do Porto e Norte de Portugal (Tourism of Porto and Northern Portugal), in an interview to Lusa news agency republished by Newsavia, a Portuguese aviation news website. Both airlines started operating to the city in 2019. Flights, however, were disrupted in the following year by the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on international air travel, and have not made a return since.
Speaking about the results of tourism in Northern Portugal in 2023 and his outlook on 2024, Martins says that these new operations — along with Azores Airlines’ nonstop transatlantic flights from Porto, already announced — would represent a significant boost to the industry locally.
«This makes us believe that 2024 can be [good], if circumstances do not change, for with the current context we never know, and despite the difficult times the world lives in, tourism in the region will indeed have a good performance».
Azul began connecting its hub in Campinas to Porto three times a week in June 2019. Emirates, meanwhile, started serving Porto a month later, with four weekly frequencies from its hub in Dubai.
The former catered to the growing demand for travel between Brazil and Portugal. From 2019 to 2022, the population of Brazilians living legally in the European country grew from 151,304 to 239,744, according to Portugal’s migration authority.
Emirates’ flight would be the second connection between Porto and the Middle East, after El Al’s route to Tel Aviv, currently suspended. Besides the United Arab Emirates, it would be a major connector between Portugal and several other countries, benefitting from the important connectivity of the hub in Dubai.
Beyond the demand to northern regions of the country, Porto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport also benefits from the capacity constraints in Lisbon Airport, to the south. While airlines may wish to increase operations to and from the Portuguese capital, the lack of slots there may make the nation’s second largest airport a viable alternative.
