TAP flies to Belo Horizonte from February

TAP will run five flights a week between Lisbon and Belo Horizonte from February 11 2008 by which time it will be offering 65 flights a week between Portugal and Brazil. The new TAP flights to the state capital of Minas Gerais will run in both directions on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Operating on Airbus A330 aircraft with a capacity of 259 passengers, flights on this new route leave Lisbon at 10am and arrive in Belo Horizonte at 5:30pm. On the return leg, they take off from Belo Horzionte at 7pm and land in the Portuguese capital at 6:05am.

Thus, the national airline transporter now flies to eight destinations in Brazil: in addition to Belo Horizonte, it also flies to Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Salvador, Natal, Recife and Fortaleza.

The option to Belo Horizonte is part of the growth strategy pursued by TAP and follows the sequence in the recent offer of new destinations by the company such as to Brasilia, Seville, Hamburg or Praia (the latter to begin operations at the end of October), departing from Lisbon, and to Rome and Brussels from Porto.

Within the context of this growth strategy, the choice of these new destinations resulted from rigorous market analysis that also considered other hypotheses such as Moscow, Washington, Toronto and Boston.

This new route to Belo Horizonte will begin seven months after the launch of the route to Brasilia which is already a remarkable success with an average occupancy rate of 80 percent in September. This way, TAP reinforces its clear leadership in terms of passenger airline transport between Europe and Brazil.

By the end of September 2007 TAP had transported a total of 716 thousand passengers between Portugal and Brazil, 16 percent more than in the same period in the previous year, with the expectation that by the end of the year a total of a million passengers transported will be reached.