Complaints Against Portuguese Fuel Retailers Have Already Passed the Whole of Last Year, and Four in Ten Concern a Discount That Never Arrived
Portal da Queixa logged 665 complaints against petrol networks and stations by August, up 84.21 percent. Loyalty-programme failures now lead the list, ahead of service quality and payment disputes.
Portuguese drivers filed 665 complaints against fuel retailers in the first eight months of 2026, up 84.21 percent on the 361 logged in the same stretch of 2025. In eight months the sector has almost matched the 667 complaints it collected across the whole of last year.
The figures come from Portal da Queixa by Consumers Trust, the country's largest private complaints platform, in data released on Tuesday. They cover petrol networks and individual filling stations, and they describe a shift in what motorists are angry about rather than a simple rise in volume.
The grievance has moved from the pump to the promotion
Discounts, campaigns and promotions are mentioned in 40.15 percent of this year's complaints, against 28.49 percent in 2025. That single line explains most of the increase. As household budgets tighten, an advertised saving has stopped being a bonus and started being something drivers count on.
Broken down by cause, failures in benefit and loyalty programmes come first at 27.11 percent of the total: points that were never credited, offers that were not honoured, and campaign conditions that customers say were never properly explained. Service quality and staff conduct follow at 24.10 percent. Financial and payment issues account for 22.74 percent, a category that gathers improper charges, payment processing failures, prices that were wrong or never displayed, and refunds that did not arrive.
One month stands out. May produced 150 complaints, the highest monthly reading in the whole series analysed and more than double the sector's monthly average.
Pedro Lourenço, founder of Portal da Queixa by Consumers Trust, said the data shows consumers "increasingly attentive to the opportunities to save on fuel, but also more demanding about the fulfilment of the advantages announced to them". He called the shift towards discount-related complaints "a warning sign" for the sector, arguing that when a discount is not applied or a campaign's terms are unclear, "frustration quickly turns into a complaint".
Why this is happening now
The complaint curve tracks a year in which fuel has been the most volatile line in the household budget. Pump prices have swung repeatedly on Middle East supply risk, and the government has spent months adjusting the fuel-tax rebate up and down to blunt the moves, most recently clawing part of the discount back on Monday. Fuel also did almost all the work in pushing Portuguese inflation back to 3.3 percent in August.
When the headline price is moving that fast, loyalty schemes and cent-per-litre campaigns become the part of the bill a driver can still control. That is precisely where the complaints are landing.
What a driver can actually do
Portal da Queixa is a private platform, not a regulator, and posting there carries no legal weight on its own. The formal route is the Livro de Reclamações (complaints book), which every filling station must make available in physical and electronic form, and which obliges the operator to respond; our step-by-step guide to filing a consumer complaint sets out how it works and where the entry goes afterwards.
For the pricing questions underneath many of these disputes, ERSE, the energy regulator, runs a fuel comparator that moved to real-time data this year, which is the simplest way to check whether an advertised discount actually beats the station down the road. Fuel is not alone in drawing more consumer anger: transport operators drew 26,933 complaints in 2025 on the regulator's own count.
