Cape Verde to Ponta Delgada costs €218. Lisbon to Ponta Delgada, half the flight time, tops €500
The Ponta Delgada chamber of commerce has written to Portugal's competition authority. It says the cheapest fare classes are almost never on sale, even on searches made for August 2027.
The comparison São Miguel’s business community has put on the table is awkward because it is internal. It does not set Azores Airlines against a rival. It sets Azores Airlines against itself.
A flight from Praia, in Cape Verde, to Ponta Delgada takes close to four hours and, for comparable dates, costs around 218 euros. Lisbon to Ponta Delgada takes about two, and shows up as a return above 500. Same carrier, half the time in the air, more than double the price.
What the chamber actually asked for
The Câmara do Comércio e Indústria de Ponta Delgada, which represents businesses on São Miguel and Santa Maria, has written to the Autoridade da Concorrência asking it to examine competition on routes between the mainland and the Azores. It is careful about what it is not alleging: it makes no claim of collusion between operators.
Its actual claims are harder to wave away. The first is that the lowest fare classes are not regularly available on either Azores Airlines or TAP, even when you search a long way ahead. The chamber says it found returns of around 500 euros for flights in August 2027, which is nearly a year out. The second is that the seats on offer cluster in the more expensive fare bands.
The control group is called Funchal
The second comparison is Madeira. On the chamber’s reading, Lisbon to Ponta Delgada sits at close to double the average Lisbon to Funchal fare over several periods. What separates the two routes is not distance. It is that more airlines are fighting for the Madeira passenger.
That connects to the third element. The shape of the Azorean market changed after Ryanair pulled out, and TAP and Azores Airlines still cooperate commercially through a code-share. In an opinion issued in May, the competition authority itself flagged the risk that a closer relationship between the two could soften competitive pressure and push prices up. The chamber’s letter is, in effect, an invitation for the regulator to revisit its own warning.
For islanders this is not a debate about airline pricing. It is the cost of getting to a hospital appointment, a funeral or a meeting. The chamber also makes the economic case: a destination that is expensive to reach loses tourists, at a point when the archipelago already has higher airport charges coming in 2027 to absorb, against a backdrop of record passenger numbers at Portuguese airports.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Siyuan He / Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)
