For all the smooth sailing I’ve had lately on various flights, yesterday’s trip on TAP Air Portugal was rather taxing, and it really had nothing to do with TAP and everything to do with Lisbon.
It’s January in Lisbon. What I didn’t know and perhaps should have was that meant fog. A lot of fog. And the delays associated with it. And the gate problem in LIS…
TAP is like a prosperity gospel preacher, in which bad news is dismissed as a lack of faith. TAP boards on time, closes the door, hopes for the best, but knows that a delay is still coming (and I suspect knew that it was already in place). Most airlines, when they are aware of air traffic control delays, will post them and often delay boarding or at least leave the aircraft door open. Not TAP.
Boarding is on time. Pushback is on time. Pushback a few feet from the gate that is. Then the inventible:
“Ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry to report that Air Traffic Control has delayed our flight due to heavy fog in Lisbon. Our new departure time is approximately 90 minutes from now. But I am expecting they will shorten this because we are ready to go.”
This is in Frankfurt. All the rubes in the cabin (and there were four others also connecting to Boston) who had taken advantage of the cheap business class fare start freaking out about a potential missed connection.
Relax, boys. Our connection is 2 hours, 50 minutes in Lisbon…
The captain again explains we boarded on time and closed the cabin door in hopes of receiving a more favorable pushback time. Nope.
We sit there and sit there. At least TAP now has power plugs onboard the A320, which really save the day.
We take off and strong headwinds prevent us from making up any time enroute. We arrive 90 minutes late into Lisbon.
To add insult to injury, Lisbon has a serious gate shortage and we pull up to a remote stand. TAP sends one bus for the entire plane, meaning we all cram into a bus that takes 15 minutes to board and 10 minutes to navigate around the airport to the terminal.
So much for my TAP Executive lounge review, though I hear it was nothing much…
Meanwhile, my next flight is about to board, since TAP starts boarding one hour before departure.
The biggest stress you can put on a travel blogger writing about a premium cabin is to miss being onboard first. Pictures with a cabin full of people or taken after the flight simply do not compare with being first onboard and having the chance to briefly photograph a pristine cabin before it fills with other passengers.
Boarding had already begun, right on schedule, for my Boston flight. I went through the requisite US security screening, boarded the flight, lugged my bag downstairs (stairs…another perfect prosperity preacher trick. Oh, are you disabled? Don’t worry, you can will yourself to walk down them…)
Then it was a 15 minute wait for a bus. Yes, even the A330neos bound for the USA require remote stands. The bus finally departs and I receive another extended ground tour of Lisbon Airport, only the bus is so crowded and the windows so dirty I cannot take any pictures.
We get onboard the A330neo—my pictures are compromised and I missed out on the lounge—and everyone is in a hurry to pushback.
Only the door closes and the captain announces a delay of at least one hour due to the fog. Like the prior captain, he is “believing” that it can be reduced.
But it isn’t. We sit there and sit there. I will say it quite a productive time for me, thought I tethered off my phone rather than use TAP’s outrageously priced onboard wi-fi.
Flnally, ever an hour later, we received clearance to depart. We lined up, waited some more, and took off.
A flight attendant later told me it’s rare not to have a delayed flight during the winter in Lisbon, since the airport only has one runway.
CONCLUSION
Let me just say that TAP Air Portugal was lovely…I’ll write about that separately. But airports and airlines are often difficult to separate. Here, Lisbon in January led to a very annoying, borderline stressful travel day.
But I hope you recognize that I’m complaining tongue and cheek…it could have been far worse.
I’d say you’re being rather charitable to TAP. Boarding a plane on time that you know is going to be delayed due to ATC/weather is pretty bush-league. (As a parent now traveling with a small child, boarding on time and then sitting in the penalty box for an hour and a half is a recurring nightmare, though luckily one I haven’t had to deal with yet…)
Looking forward to the review, though.
I just flew on TAP from Germany to LIS last week. Interesting, there was no fog during our entire 4 day stay. Sounds like unfortunately they saved it all up :/
Fog in January in Lisbon isn’t that frequent, although I will blame you for the bad weather we are getting. Had you come one week earlier it was lovely and sunny all around.
Btw, TAP is known to be late a lot of times. But the crews are usually good, friendly and helpful. There was never a single TAP crew I didn’t like. Can’t forget that one time when they let me stock up on the chocolate that remained after the flight was finished.
The crew was amazing. It easily made up for the delay!
Typical of Portugal
I ‘d agree – the onboard experience and the TAP onboard folks were great. Lisbon airport .. what a mess ! ..
Why you keep going back ..to moan ??
Adverse weather is always out of the airlines control so I don’t really get the point of your article. Overtourism is certainly an issue in Lisbon and current airport no longer fit for purpose to deal with the millions visiting each year.
Tongue in cheek.
The phrase is tongue in cheek.
I bit at TAP’s recent promotion: 15% off their J fully refundable/anytime changes fare, O/W LIS-BOS $897. This came out cheaper than their non-refundable J fare. I always wanted to try TAP, but waited until they the A330neo. Matt, please let me know if I should consider canceling. P.S. My flight is in May, so hopefully the fog will have lifted by then.
Hi John, I booked the same fares (well, from FRA for same price). TAP was good overall. Lovely service onboard. Review is coming in the days ahead.
It sounds like your experience of LIS was quite normal. It’s a third world airport with far too many passengers and flights for the capacity it has.
Bus boarding and disembarkation is the norm and some of the rides are long. TAP never offer a business class bus but do allow you to board it early so you can spend longer on it – that’s particularly awful in hot weather because there is no aircon on 90% of the buses. Some of the rides to remote stands are very long and very uncomfortalble.
The other problem particulary with TAP is that they schedule impossibly short turn arounds at LIS. Often boarding the bus will start before the plane has landed and you will be driven to the plane and held on the bus as the arriving passengers are driven away and the cleaners go aboard and the catering trucks arrive. You get to board, eventually.
I reckon you get a gate with a pier about one time in twenty at LIS regardless of the airline or aircraft, it’s completely random but many of the gates are more suitable for A320s rather than anything larger.
In terms of the TAP lounge, you missed a non-experience. I can’t think of an airline which has such a poor facility at its home base, the food selection is minimal and the plates are small. The seats are mostly uncomfortable and the washrooms inadequate for the numbers of people using the lounge.
Add to that TAP no longer offers any lounge access at outstations unless it’s a *A partner lounge and their ground experience is poor.
All in all, I think you fared quite well compared to the norm at LIS!
Did I understand you went all the way to Lisbon and you did not spend time there and enjoyed the amazing Portuguese cuisine?
I’ve been before. This was a “work” trip.
I got stuck in this crap yesterday too.
The flight from LHR was delayed 2 hours which meant instead of going
LHR-LIS-SFO ended up going from LHR-LIS-ORD-SFO … added an extra 12 hours to my journey – god knows where my checked bags are. Their website is crap for reporting this. You call in and their phone system dumps you half the time.
When I got to ORD there was no-one there to report the no show bags too …..
Still chasing them — hopefully they’ll show.
Next thing is to go to the Staralliance site and see if they can do tracking from there.
If you want to complain to them you can send an email to file.connosco @ tap.pt
— it sends an autoresponder saying they’ll get back to you …
The other problem with Lis is TAP have expanded so rapidly recently you almost always get a remote gate with a bus ride when you arrive — it adds 20-30 minutes to any connections – i.e. don’t plan on successfully connecting in less than 2 hours there these days …
The other problem with Lis is TAP have expanded so rapidly recently you almost always get a remote gate with a bus ride when you arrive — it adds 20-30 minutes to any connections – i.e. don’t plan on successfully connecting in less than 2 hours there these days …
Ooh, an entitled travel blogger. Thanks for destroying our planet!
Not a fair accusation. Matthew has the best blog in the world, even better than Lucky, which is very good. The TAP flight was flying anyway and the number of bloggers per flight is probably 0.06%. If someday 10% of passengers were bloggers, that would be different.
While interesting, I will probably never visit Lisbon so his blog won’t cause me to waste fuel.
Hello, as someone who is from Lisbon, lives abroad and uses Lisbon as a hub, I may have a couple of insights on this. Some may be more accurate than others though.
1) Lisbon is a bit of a hot spot for tourism nowadays. It already received it’s fair share of turista before but over the past 10 years the number multiplied a few times. You can pinpoint the moment the madness started to the moment RyanAir first landed in Lisbon;
2) The airport cannot be expanded. It’s running at full capacity for almost 20 years. They expanded and revamped the airport, adding a new section just for outside Europe flights and built Terminal 2 to accommodate RyanAir and similar carriers (but that Terminal is just a glorified bus station). Beyond this there’s not much than can be done;
A shiny new airport is in debate since 1969… it was planned (again) around 10 years ago but Financial Crisis + Austerity + Prime Minister that promises not to built airport even if funded by the EU at a 70% rate means it all ended in tears.
The new plan is to build an airport just for the Low Costs… which is great if you want to become an hostage of said low costs;
3) Privatisation of airport management. Lisbon joined some five years ago the Vinci family of airports. In the name of efficiency the airport now has less staff doing more than before, given the number of tourists is still on the rise;
Weather can also be a factor by I have the sneaky suspicion the above mentioned trinity of factors had a not so small role in your Lisbon airport experience.
But, hey, not everything is bad. Your initial flight being late is not a death sentence to your connection as it is likely the second flight will also be late. It happened to me already. I had both flights late two hours. Now that’s efficiency.
We flew from Manchester on 23 December boarded the plane then had a two and half delay due to fog then were in a twenty minute banking queue at Lisbon airport. We have always been bused to the terminal there so your experience was nothing unusual. We used Ryanair which were very good .
Great