Two Thirds of Portuguese Trips Abroad Now Fall Outside the Summer, While Air Fares Have Outgrown Inflation Since 2016

Most trips abroad taken by residents of Portugal no longer happen in the summer. In 2025, 65.6 percent of foreign trips fell outside July, August and September, according to an analysis published on Thursday by ANAV, the Associação Nacional das Agências de Viagens (National Association of Travel Agencies).

August remains the single heaviest month, carrying 16.3 percent of the total on its own. But the association's point is that the rest of the calendar has caught up. Outbound tourism from Portugal, it argues, has stopped being a phenomenon tied exclusively to the summer months.

The record underneath the seasonal shift

The redistribution is happening on a rising base. ANAV puts residents' trips abroad at a record 3.858 million in 2025, up 12.5 percent on 2024. That sits alongside the wider picture we reported in April, when INE's provisional series showed residents taking a record 26 million trips in total, the great majority of them domestic.

The association drew on data covering 2016 to 2025 from Turismo de Portugal's TravelBI platform, the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (National Statistics Institute, or INE), Eurostat and the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal).

Two money figures come out of that, and they measure different things. Travel and tourism debits recorded by the Banco de Portugal reached 7.154 billion euros in 2025, more than double the 2016 figure; that is a balance-of-payments measure, capturing what residents spent abroad across all purposes. ANAV's own estimate of total spending on these leisure and personal trips is about 3.10 billion euros, reached by multiplying trip numbers by average spend.

Average spend per trip was 803.20 euros, down 4.8 percent on 2024. People spent less per trip and took more of them, and the total went up anyway.

Flying has outrun general inflation

The cost side is where the decade looks least comfortable. Between 2016 and 2025, ANAV says, air transport prices rose 31.0 percent and international package prices 29.6 percent, against general inflation of 24.9 percent over the same period.

That gap is modest in any single year and substantial across ten. Travelling abroad has become significantly more expensive over the last decade, the association concluded, and it has done so faster than the general cost of living that Portuguese wages are measured against.

It is also the argument that most directly serves ANAV's members, which is worth stating plainly. The association is a trade body for travel agencies, and a case that the mid-season represents a growing opportunity, offering greater flexibility in choosing dates and destinations and more balanced activity across the year, is a case for booking through the people it represents.

Spain takes nearly two in five

Spain held its position as the leading destination for residents of Portugal, taking 38.8 percent of foreign trips in 2025. France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany complete the five individually identified markets with the greatest weight.

The mover is Cabo Verde, which ANAV says came close to the top five after adding 1.9 percentage points of share. That is a different kind of trip from a weekend over the Spanish border, and a sign of how much of Portuguese outbound travel runs along Portuguese-speaking routes.

On agency use, 26.7 percent of foreign trips in 2025 went through an agency or tour operator. ANAV puts that at roughly 4.1 times the agency share across all trips, foreign and domestic combined, which is unsurprising: nobody books a weekend in the Alentejo through an operator. The share slipped 0.9 percentage points year on year, but because the overall number of trips grew, the implied volume of organised travel rose about 8.8 percent, to approximately 1.03 million trips.

2026 is running ahead again

The growth has not levelled off. In the first quarter of 2026, residents of Portugal made 923,800 trips abroad, 30 percent more than in the same period of 2025. Banco de Portugal travel debits in the first half reached 3.159 billion euros, a year-on-year increase of 5.3 percent.

A first quarter up 30 percent is the seasonal argument made twice over. January to March is precisely the stretch that used to be quiet.

For residents planning trips outside the European Union, one piece of friction that was supposed to arrive this year has not. The EU's 20 euro ETIAS travel authorisation slipped to 2027 after a difficult rollout of the new border system, which leaves the requirement hanging over the shoulder season rather than this one. Portugal's inbound strategy, meanwhile, has been pivoting from volume to value. The outbound numbers are going the other way: more trips, spread wider across the year, each one worth slightly less.