AirHelp Score 2026 Drops Lisbon Humberto Delgado to 274th of 279 Airports — Madeira 262nd, Porto 192nd and Faro 125th as Portugal's Network Underperforms a Global 8.50 Top

The 2026 edition of the AirHelp Score, the global airport ranking the Polish compensation-claims platform publishes annually, lands Lisbon's Humberto Delgado airport at 274th of 279 airports analysed, only five places off the bottom of the table. The result was first surfaced in Portugal by Público on 9 June, picking up the index that scores airports on a combined window from 1 May 2025 to 30 April 2026.

Only five airports trail Lisbon in the ranking — Islamabad, Hurghada, Ho Chi Minh City, Lahore and Tunis-Carthage. The Portuguese capital's overall score lands at 6.9 out of 10, dragged primarily by a 6.3 punctuality read against 6.8 on facilities and comfort and 7.3 on passenger experience. AirHelp's methodology weights punctuality at 60% of the composite, with passenger experience and facilities each contributing 20%.

Portugal's four-airport spread

The ranking covers all four major Portuguese hubs. Faro is the country's best performer at 125th with a 7.61 composite, helping the Algarve hold ground as a relatively functional summer gateway. Porto follows at 192nd on 7.41, before the picture deteriorates sharply: Madeira's Cristiano Ronaldo Airport comes in at 262nd on 6.96 — a result consistent with its wind-driven operational volatility, including the strong gales that diverted 50-plus flights to Porto Santo on 8–9 June this week. Lisbon then closes the Portuguese set at 274th on 6.9.

The score gap between the best and worst Portuguese airport is roughly 0.7 points — narrower than it looks because the ranking compresses heavily at the top: the global leaders, Tocumen in Panama City, Fortaleza in Brazil and Cape Town in South Africa, all land near 8.50.

Volume meeting an unchanged footprint

AirHelp's commentary lines up with what aviation veterans in Portugal have been saying for months. The report notes that "o elevado volume de tráfego (cerca de 225.000 voos anuais) continua a pressionar o desempenho operacional" — roughly 225,000 annual movements squeezed through a terminal footprint that has not materially grown across a decade of 70% passenger growth.

The diagnosis matches the IATA punctuality warning Rafael Schvartzman issued on 2 June, which cited a 51% Eurocontrol on-time reading for Humberto Delgado heading into summer, and with ANA's 6 June EIA filing with the APA proposing a movement-cap step from 38 to 40 per hour with works starting early 2027 and a second EIA already queued to push toward 42.

The expat read

For new arrivals routing through Lisbon, the AirHelp position is a reasonable proxy for the experience the city has been delivering. The composite folds together the punctuality problem — already familiar to anyone who has connected through Humberto Delgado this spring — with the saturation that the EES border-control rollout exposed across April and May. The 7.3 passenger-experience read is the only Lisbon sub-score that breaks above 7, and even that lags Faro's headline 7.61.

For arrivals into the Algarve, Faro's 125th position is the most reassuring data point in the table. For Madeira-bound travellers, the 262nd ranking should be read alongside the airport's weather profile — a non-trivial share of flight disruption there is structural rather than operational. Porto sits roughly in the middle of the global pack, broadly consistent with the 8.3% Q1 2026 passenger growth reading that the ANA network published in May.

What changes from here

Two policy levers are visible. The first is the ANA capacity-expansion EIA, which targets 2027 works to lift the hourly movement cap; a second EIA pushing further to 42/hour is already in the pipeline. The second is the 360-officer PSP reinforcement Luís Neves committed to activate in July, which should ease the border-control queues that have repeatedly tipped over an hour at Lisbon and Porto across the EES bedding-in. Neither lever moves AirHelp's 2027 score on its own, but both speak directly to the punctuality and experience components that are dragging the 2026 read.

The 2026 ranking covers the year ending 30 April 2026, so this summer's performance — strikes, EES queues, capacity ceilings and weather — feeds directly into the 2027 index. On current trajectory, Lisbon's path back into the mid-table looks narrow.