Portugal has finally named the regulators for your EU passenger rights on trains, coaches and ferries
The President promulgated a government decree on 24 August giving domestic effect to EU regulations on carriage of passengers and baggage by rail, road and sea, explicitly covering hand luggage, pets and bicycles.
Taking a bike on the train, travelling with the cat in a carrier, checking a bag onto a scheduled ferry — all of this has been regulated at EU level for years. What Portugal was missing is the dull, decisive part: who checks, who takes the complaint, who issues the fine.
That gap is what the government has just closed. On 24 August, the President promulgated the decree giving domestic legal effect to the obligations arising from several European regulations on the carriage of passengers and baggage. The Belém note is unusually specific about what is in scope: hand luggage, pets, bicycles and other goods.
Which journeys this covers
Three modes. Rail, road and sea — and in the maritime case the wording expressly includes inland navigable waterways, meaning river crossings. Air travel is not on this list.
What changes in practice is that rules which already existed on European paper acquire a named national authority and a penalty procedure behind them. That is the difference between holding a right and having somewhere to go when it is ignored.
When it starts to bite
Not yet. A government decree only takes effect once it is published in the Diário da República, and it is from that date, plus whatever entry-into-force period the text sets for itself, that there is anything to comply with. For now there is a signature.
Worth bookmarking, because this is precisely the kind of instrument nobody goes back to look for. We ran the same exercise on the ride-hailing law signed earlier this summer, where the gap between the signature and the actual change was the whole story.
Photo: FF Mira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
