Don’t Fly TAP – Air Portugal. Nice flight crews, unreliable planes, terrible app

Don't Fly TAP (Air Portugal).

But if you do fly TAP -- Pay attention to their App. 

It took four flights for me to get from Paris to New York on Veterans Day. That was not the day I planned to travel. And I did not book a terrible four-segment super-discount flight. 

Only two of the four flights flights actually took off—though I spent more time on the ground on the runway in Lisbon than the flight to get to Lisbon from Paris. 

I was supposed to fly from Paris to Newark changing planes in Lisbon on November 10. Two days before the flight, I got an email saying the flight was cancelled and I would be flying from Paris to Lisbon at 8am on November 11. At 12:10pm I would be flying to Newark. No options. Take it or leave it.

On November 11, I woke up at 5am. The flight from Paris to Lisbon was uneventful. We boarded the flight to America by 12:30pm then sat on the runway for more than 2 hours until we left the plane at 3pm for the long bus ride back to the terminal. In the terminal they herded all of us to a gate where three nice people from TAP processed two or three people in the first half hour. At this rate it would be Thanksgiving before we all got flights.

While waiting in line to get rebooked, I started talking to the couple in front of me: Iris and Jim. I was telling them that some of the angrier people were, like me, people who had a flight cancelled yesterday. We started talking about how other flights handle cancellations. 

If this were a United flight, our phones would have lit up before we reached the terminal with rebook options. TAP does not do that. I told them that when TAP cancelled my flight the day before, they rebooked me to an 8am departure the next day—they did not offer options. And with TAP, when you check in early, you can’t change anything until, as the agent on the phone told me, they release the reservation from their system. 

To show Iris and Jim what I meant, I hit the My Trips button in the TAP app. When I did, the app said I had been rebooked to JFK and I was leaving in one hour from Gate 41. 

“Oh Shit! I have a flight!” I said loudly. 

I checked. No TAP emails. No TAP messages. If I had not hit My Trips in the app, I would not have known and missed the flight. Iris and Jim did not have the phone app. They went to the TAP website. Nothing. 

Iris and Jim said, "Go to the gate!" I did. And made the flight. Which means the three gate agents who had us standing in Gate 46 for more than an hour had no idea their system was rebooking people. Again, no options. 

Flying into JFK at night instead of Newark means there is no way I can get home. By the time I landed and cleared customs at JFK and took the train to Penn Station New York, the last train from Philadelphia to Lancaster was already gone. 

So, I took NJ Transit to Princeton Junction to the cheapest hotel between NYC and Philadelphia and started catching up on all the sleep I lost getting home. 

I worked for a dot.com twenty years ago before apps existed and when e-commerce was new. In the late 90s and early 2000s, companies that did not have fully integrated systems sometimes had to take data from one system and enter it in another—let’s say communications and reservation management had separate systems. Connecting the two was called a “Sneaker Net.” People walked printouts from one part of the office to another. 

I signed up for every notification I could on the TAP app. I got one email and one text per flight. And the fact that their gate agents had no idea that automatic rebookings were happening says they really don’t understand their own system. United hits you up with options so fast that the angry crowd at the gate never forms. 

If I have not given you enough reasons to fly any other airline but TAP, consider the aircraft themselves. Both of the cancelled flights and the flight I eventually took to America were on Airbus A321 aircraft. They are narrow-body jets with 6-across seating and the only aisle in the middle. The 150 economy-class passengers share 3 toilets. The 200 economy passengers in an A330 (the more common transatlantic aircraft) share 6 toilets with two aisles and twice as many aisle seats. 

You could still choose TAP based on price, but in the sleepless world of transatlantic travel, I will tap a different airline.