National airline TAP has announced plans to make Portugal “the gateway to Europe for Canadians”.
To do this, the carrier is launching a new Toronto-Lisbon summer air link on June 10 – the first to link the two countries in 21 years.
“We want to convince Canadians to visit Portugal more, and to fly to Europe using TAP,” the airline’s sales director in North America, Carlos Paneiro, said at a press conference to present the air link in Toronto.
The new route will run until the end of September, with five weekly flights serviced by an A330 airbus.
Paneiro says “5,000 reservations have already been made”, with average prices around the €365 mark.
The goal “in the future” is to offer daily flights between the two cities, as TAP already does in Boston, New York and Miami.
As Lusa news agency points out, official records show that 429,000 Portuguese people (or of Portuguese-descent) live in Canada, though the real number is believed to be around 550,000. Most of them live in Ontario, and either lived or had family that emigrated from the Azores archipelago.
