TAP Air Portugal carried 21.7 percent more people in 2017 than in the previous year, reaching an aggregate of 14.274 million passengers by the end of December, 2.55 million more than the previous year’s figure.
The growth in load factor, regarding the seats offered in 2017, also increased significantly, by 4.3 percentage points, to 82.9 per cent.
The Lisbon-Porto Ponte Aérea shuttle was TAP’s most popular route in 2017, with a total of 726,000 passengers, eight percent more than in 2016.
TAP’s new investment in the North American market in 2017 has involved opening a new route to Toronto and consolidating the Boston and New York JFK routes, which were initiated in June and July the previous year. This has translated into a 54.5 percent increase in the number of passengers to a total of 729,000, which is 257,000 more passengers than in 2016.
Connections to Brazil underwent strong recovery over the course of the year, growing by 14 percent as TAP carried 1.6 million passengers.
Connections between mainland Portugal and Madeira and the Azores exceeded the one million passenger mark for the first time, with passenger numbers rising by 18.9 percent, or 183,000 passengers, reaching an annual aggregate total of 1.15 million.
It is also important to mention the African routes, where TAP also achieved an annual total of more than one million passengers for the first time, following growth of 233,000, or 29 percent.
However, it was on European routes that TAP grew most in terms of absolute number of passengers, with an increase of 1.6 million compared to the previous year. TAP carried an aggregate total of 8.7 million passengers in the 12-month period of 2017, a 22 percent increase on 2016.
2017 was the first time TAP carried more than 500,000 passengers on its Lisbon-London Heathrow, Lisbon-Barcelona and Lisbon-Madrid routes in one year. This passenger numbers milestone was also registered on the Lisbon-Porto, Lisbon-Funchal and Lisbon-Paris routes, which had also achieved that mark in previous years.
The strong growth of TAP throughout the year was consolidated in December. In this month the airline reached 1.169 million passengers, an increase of 18.4 percent compared to the same month of 2016.
New records were also set in air freight carried. TAP Cargo ended 2017 having carried a total of 78,500 tons of freight and mail, which is 25% higher than the figure carried in 2016. It is worth mentioning that 80 percent of the total volume transported originated in markets outside Portugal.
