Portugal's Airport Regulator Broke a Deadlock Over Baggage and Security Queues, and the New Rules Cannot Penalise Anyone Until 2028

Portugal's civil aviation regulator has ended a deadlock the industry could not resolve on its own. The Autoridade Nacional da Aviação Civil (National Civil Aviation Authority, ANAC) announced on Friday that its board approved, at a meeting on 31 August, the final decision on the Regime de Qualidade do Serviço Aeroportuário (Airport Service Quality Regime, RQSA) for 2027, introducing new performance indicators for security screening and baggage delivery at the five airports run by ANA.

The regulator was explicit about why the decision was its to make. The RQSA is set through a consultation between the airport operator and the airport users, meaning the airlines and other companies that buy access to the infrastructure. That consultation ended without agreement, and under article 71 of Decreto-Lei 254/2012 of 28 November it then falls to ANAC to decide the matters put before it.

What was approved

• Security screening. A change in how processing times are measured, so the passenger experience is assessed "more rigorously".
• Baggage delivery. An update to both the measurement methodology and the service levels, to fit them better to "operational reality".
• Operational monitoring. New operational performance indicators, for "greater transparency and capacity to identify constraints".
• Regulatory supervision. A strengthened performance-based monitoring model, to push continuous improvement in airport quality.

An official ANAC source confirmed to the Lusa news agency that the decision covers Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Funchal and Ponta Delgada, the five airports held under concession by ANA Aeroportos de Portugal, itself owned by the French group Vinci.

The date that matters is January 2028

ANAC's communiqué carries a detail the wire coverage did not. Technical work begins this month, with the indicators fleshed out and the measurement systems built. Through 2027 there is a phase of monitoring, technical validation and data collection, including periodic reporting of results back to the regulator. And then: "the new security screening and baggage delivery indicators will start producing effects for evaluation purposes and possible penalties, within the RQSA, from January 2028."

So the regulator has decided what to measure, but the measurements carry no financial consequence for sixteen months. That is not unusual for a regime that has to agree definitions before it can score anyone against them, and ANAC frames the phasing as "consistent and sustained". It does mean that a passenger standing in a screening queue at Humberto Delgado next summer is inside a data-collection exercise rather than a penalty regime.

Why these two

Security queues and baggage are the two points Portuguese airports have been marked down on. In June, the AirHelp Score 2026 placed Lisbon 274th out of 279 airports worldwide, with Madeira 262nd and Porto 192nd. In August, the PSP's border unit was found to have poured almost 400 officers into airport queues in its first year. Traffic is no longer the pressure valve either: Portuguese airports posted their first passenger fall in six months in June, down 0.1 percent. The physical fix at Lisbon is a construction project rather than a rule: ANA's expansion of the existing airport reached the steel stage in August.

What this means for passengers here

• Nothing changes this year. The measures start as technical work in September and run through 2027 as a data exercise.
• Five airports are covered. Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Funchal and Ponta Delgada, the ANA concession. Other Portuguese airfields sit outside the regime.
• Delays are a separate matter. Airport service quality is not the same as compensation when a flight is late or cancelled. That sits under EU261, and our guide to air passenger rights in Portugal sets out how to claim.
• ANAC does fine. Its civil aviation penalty scale was reset upward in May. The enforcement machinery exists; it is the RQSA indicators that wait until 2028.

The regulator says it will keep tracking service quality and exercising its powers "independently, transparently and orientated towards the defence of the public interest". The first hard test of that is the 2027 reporting, and whether the numbers ANA files are ones the airlines accept. They could not agree on the method; they will now argue about the results.