Regulator Bars an Iberia-Linked Consortium From Airport Ground-Handling, Clearing the Path for Menzies
ANAC has excluded the Iberia-linked Union South consortium from the seven-year ground-handling tender at Lisbon, Porto and Faro, saying it failed to prove it could mobilise the resources it promised, and has called Menzies-owned SPdH to advance instead.
The long-running contest to handle baggage, check-in and aircraft servicing at Portugal’s three biggest airports has taken another sharp turn. The National Civil Aviation Authority (Autoridade Nacional da Aviação Civil, ANAC) has confirmed that it is excluding the Union South consortium from the tender for ground-handling licences at Lisbon, Porto and Faro, and has instead called on a rival bidder — the operator formerly known as Groundforce — to move forward in the process.
Union South is a partnership between the services group Clece and South Europe Ground Services, a handling company within the Iberia group, the Spanish flag carrier owned by IAG. The consortium had originally submitted the top-ranked proposal and looked set to win the seven-year concession. ANAC now says it failed to demonstrate that it met the requirements of the licensing phase — “namely the mobilisation of the necessary resources” — and has therefore been shut out.
The beneficiary is SPdH, the Portuguese handler once branded Groundforce and now controlled by the British group Menzies Aviation. Menzies had contested the earlier stages of the tender, at one point filing a precautionary court injunction against the initial award to Union South. With the Spanish-Iberia consortium removed, ANAC has invited SPdH to advance, putting it in pole position to secure the licence to operate at the country’s three main gateways.
Ground handling is the unglamorous but essential business of turning an aircraft around on the tarmac: loading and unloading bags, checking in passengers, pushing back planes, cleaning cabins and marshalling ground equipment. At busy hubs it is tightly regulated and awarded through periodic tenders, precisely because a single failure — a strike, a staffing shortfall, a botched handover — can ripple out into delayed flights and stranded travellers across an entire network.
Portugal knows that risk well. The incumbent handling arrangements have been kept alive by a series of licence extensions, most recently stretched out to October 2026, precisely to avoid a gap in service while the legal wrangling over the new concession played out. For an operation the size of Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport — already straining against capacity limits ahead of a planned new airport at Alcochete — continuity on the apron is not a minor administrative concern but a condition of the whole system running on time.
The decision also carries a competitive edge. Handling the ground operations at Lisbon, Porto and Faro is a valuable, high-volume mandate, and the tussle has pitted a Spanish-Iberia grouping against a British-owned operator with deep Portuguese roots. ANAC’s reasoning — that a bidder must actually prove it can marshal the staff and equipment it promised, not merely offer the best paper proposal — sets a marker for how the regulator intends to weigh deliverability against price.
The saga is not necessarily over. Exclusion decisions of this kind are frequently challenged in the administrative courts, and Union South could seek to overturn ANAC’s ruling, just as Menzies previously went to court over the earlier award. For now, though, the momentum has swung decisively towards SPdH and Menzies.
For passengers, the practical stakes are simple: whoever ends up holding the licence will be responsible for the smoothness of the journey from kerb to cabin at the airports most travellers to Portugal pass through. The outcome comes as the aviation sector’s ownership map keeps shifting, with Air France-KLM and Lufthansa in the final stretch of bidding for a stake in TAP.
