Five Months After Ryanair Left the Azores, Chega Demands the Full Ledger of What Eleven Years Cost the Region

Five months after Ryanair flew its last route out of the Azores, the region's parliament has been asked to produce the bill. Chega's Azorean group filed a requerimento on Friday demanding that the regional government disclose every euro paid to the low-cost carrier, directly or indirectly, between 2015 and 2026, and explain what went wrong in the negotiations meant to keep it there.

"Ryanair has already left. Now we need to know what failed, what this relationship cost the Azores and what the consequences of the departure were," said Jose Pacheco, the party's parliamentary leader and regional head. "But above all, we want to know what the government's plan is to recover routes, seats and competition."

The contract at the centre of it

The requerimento, addressed to the PSD, CDS-PP and PPM regional executive, makes two specific points. The first is chronological: only a few months before Ryanair decided to abandon the archipelago, the possibility of reopening its base at Ponta Delgada had been publicly floated. The second is financial: in March 2025, Visit Azores, the body responsible for promoting the region as a destination, signed a contract with Ryanair worth 1.885 million euros plus VAT to promote the Azores in external markets.

Chega wants the total paid to Ryanair or companies in the same group by the regional government, by Visit Azores or by any other regionally funded entity across those eleven years. It also wants the proposals the executive put forward to stop the airline leaving, and the reasons the talks failed. Azoreans, Pacheco said, "have the right to know how much public money was involved in this relationship, what the counterparties were and what results were obtained".

What the region actually lost

Ryanair stopped serving the Azores on 29 March 2026, having confirmed the decision in January and cited airport charges and European environmental taxation. It had operated in the region for eleven years, carrying more than 100,000 tourists a year and accounting for close to a tenth of the region's tourist overnight stays.

Estimates of the damage vary widely, which is part of why the ledger is being demanded. The Ponta Delgada chamber of commerce and industry put the airline's total annual economic impact at possibly more than 160 million euros and warned the exit could stall regional GDP growth outright, in a region where tourism is roughly a fifth of the economy. The chamber in Angra do Heroismo pushed back, noting that Azorean tourism kept growing even after Ryanair cut its operation by 75 percent in 2023, and arguing that other structural factors explain the recent softening.

The connectivity picture since has been mixed rather than bleak. Terceira won its first New York nonstop this month, with United flying it three times a week from June 2027. Inter-island travel has had its own troubles: a technical fault took the Gilberto Mariano out of service and reshuffled sailings in the middle of the season. Nationally, tourism growth cooled in the second quarter to 1.2 percent in overnight stays, with revenue outpacing visitor numbers.

What This Means for Expats

• If you fly to the Azores: the low-cost option is gone and has not been replaced. Book earlier and expect legacy-carrier pricing on mainland-to-island routes.
• If you live in the islands: the questions filed cover routes, seats and competition, not just money. Any answer that arrives will be the clearest public account yet of what replacement capacity, if any, is being negotiated.
• On promotion contracts generally: paying an airline to market a destination is standard practice across European regions. What Chega is testing is whether the counterparties were enforceable when the airline chose to leave.
• Cost context: airport charges were Ryanair's stated grievance. Portugal also levies a 2 euro carbon charge on departing flights, which has raised 266 million euros since 2021.

A requerimento is a question, not a finding, and the regional government is under no obligation to answer quickly. But the eleven-year figure, once published, will settle an argument that has been conducted entirely in estimates since January.