AHRESP President Carlos Moura warns that the Azores face a problem not of attractiveness, but of access, as fewer airline seats and higher fares place growing pressure on tourism, hospitality and restaurants
There is a particular paradox in the geography of islands: what makes them desirable is often what makes them difficult to reach. Distance creates mystery, preserves landscapes, protects difference and gives islands much of the emotional power they exercise over the imagination. But distance also has a price. In the Azores, where tourism has become increasingly important to the regional economy, that price is measured not only in nautical miles or hours of flight, but in airline seats, fares, routes, frequency and the increasingly consequential question of whether the traveler who dreams of reaching the archipelago can actually afford to get there.
For Carlos Moura, president of AHRESP — the Portuguese Hotel, Restaurant and Similar Establishments Association — that distinction has become essential to understanding the present moment in Azorean tourism. The problem, he argues, is not that the islands have ceased to attract visitors. It is that access to them has become more difficult and expensive. “We can have an extraordinary destination and carry out excellent promotion, but if there are not enough airline seats at competitive prices, that demand will hardly translate into tourists actually present on the islands,” Moura said during the inauguration of AHRESP’s new facilities in Ponta Delgada. It is a deceptively simple observation, but one that goes to the heart of the economics of an island destination: desire is not the same as arrival.
The figures provide substance to that concern. According to Moura, the Azores recorded a decline of approximately 10 percent in arriving passengers during the first half of 2026. He points particularly to the departure of Ryanair, which removed both capacity and competition from the market, with an especially significant effect on connections between the archipelago and mainland Portugal. The behavior of the domestic market makes the contrast still clearer. During the first half of the year, the national market declined by 8.3 percent in the Azores while growing by 2.4 percent nationally. For Moura, that divergence suggests that what is occurring in the islands cannot simply be attributed to a general slowdown in Portuguese tourism. There is, he argues, a specifically Azorean difficulty involving accessibility, seat availability and the cost of travel.
That difficulty is particularly significant because tourism in an archipelago cannot be understood as though geography were incidental. The Azores are not one destination but nine islands separated by stretches of Atlantic, each possessing different levels of accommodation, transportation infrastructure, visitor demand and seasonality. Getting tourists to Ponta Delgada or Terceira is only part of the equation. The deeper challenge is creating an air transportation system capable of allowing tourism to circulate through the archipelago rather than becoming increasingly concentrated wherever access is easiest. Moura summarizes the problem in a sentence that could serve almost as a definition of the next phase of Azorean tourism policy: “The challenge is to ensure that tourists can reach the nine islands, under competitive conditions and throughout the entire year.”
The July passenger figures released by the Regional Statistics Service of the Azores reinforce the sense that something in the pattern of arrivals has shifted. Azorean airports registered approximately 296,000 arriving passengers during the month, 4.3 percent fewer than in July 2025. Terceira received approximately 60,300 passengers, representing a decline of 2.1 percent. Only Pico and Flores recorded year-over-year increases, of 5.3 and 5.2 percent respectively. Everywhere else the movement was downward: Corvo declined 12.7 percent, São Miguel 7 percent, São Jorge 6.7 percent, Graciosa 3.5 percent, Terceira 2.1 percent, Santa Maria 1.5 percent and Faial 0.6 percent. A single month cannot define the future of a tourism economy, but when such figures are considered alongside the decline registered during the first half of the year, they become difficult to dismiss as statistical noise.
What is especially revealing in Moura’s argument is his insistence that the Azores do not need to invent demand. The archipelago has spent years establishing itself internationally as a destination of unusual environmental beauty and cultural distinctiveness. Its volcanic landscapes, ocean, trails, villages, food, whale watching, heritage and increasingly sophisticated tourism offerings have created a recognizable identity in international travel markets. The question, therefore, is no longer simply how to persuade someone in Boston, Toronto, Lisbon, Paris or elsewhere to imagine an Azorean holiday. The question is whether the transportation system can convert that imagination into presence.
This is why air connectivity functions almost as invisible infrastructure. A hotel can improve its rooms, a restaurant can refine its menu, a municipality can restore historic streets, tourism authorities can create compelling international campaigns and entrepreneurs can develop new experiences, but none of these efforts controls the price of the airline ticket that stands between the visitor and the island. For continental destinations, transportation is one variable among many. For an archipelago situated in the middle of the North Atlantic, it is the threshold through which nearly everything else must pass.
Moura therefore calls for more connections, lower prices and new routes, but also for continuity throughout the year. That final point is particularly important. The challenge of Azorean tourism is not merely attracting more people during the already busy summer months. Seasonality remains one of the structural weaknesses confronting businesses whose expenses continue in January and February even when the streets, hotels and dining rooms become considerably quieter. Expanding year-round connectivity could consequently matter as much as increasing peak-season capacity. A tourism economy cannot be sustained indefinitely by a calendar in which several months must economically compensate for the rest of the year.
Promotion, Moura argues, must likewise be coordinated with markets that possess direct access to the archipelago. There is a practical wisdom in the proposition. Tourism promotion and transportation planning cannot exist in separate worlds. Advertising a destination intensively in a market from which reaching it is expensive, inconvenient or dependent upon difficult connections risks creating aspiration without conversion. Direct routes, competitive fares and destination promotion form parts of the same ecosystem. When one disappears, the others become less effective.
The consequences are already being felt beyond airport terminals. In accommodation, Moura notes, declining demand comes at a moment when businesses are simultaneously confronting high operating expenses and the additional costs imposed by insularity. Restaurants face an even more demanding equation: reduced consumption coincides with substantial increases in the price of ingredients and everyday operating costs. The pressure is not exclusively Azorean. Between January and May 2026, Portugal recorded 2,833 more restaurant closures than openings. But island businesses must absorb that national economic pressure while also confronting seasonality, transportation costs and the vulnerability inherent in depending upon visitors who must cross the sea by air before spending a single euro in a hotel, café or restaurant.
The issue consequently reaches beyond tourism statistics. A restaurant buys from suppliers, employs cooks and servers, pays rent and utilities and participates in the commercial life of a town. A hotel employs receptionists, housekeepers, maintenance workers and managers while purchasing services from other local businesses. A visitor rents a car, drinks coffee, enters a museum, purchases local products, takes a whale-watching trip, visits a vineyard or pays for a taxi. The passenger counted at an airport is therefore not merely a passenger. That arrival carries potential economic activity outward into a network of livelihoods distributed across the island.
And therein lies perhaps the more complicated meaning of accessibility in the Azores. Connectivity is not simply about bringing tourists into the archipelago; it is also about determining where within the archipelago tourism can remain economically viable. Nine islands do not enter the tourism economy with equal advantages. Differences in population, airport capacity, routes, accommodation and market recognition inevitably shape their ability to compete. If connectivity contracts, the danger is not merely that the Azores receive fewer visitors. It is that tourism becomes still more concentrated on the islands and during the seasons where access is easiest.
For decades, island societies have understood distance as both condition and destiny. Ships once measured that distance in days and weeks; aviation compressed it into hours. Yet modern accessibility has never abolished geography. It has simply translated geography into schedules, routes, capacity and price. An island may be only a few hours from a major European or North American city and still become economically distant if the flight is unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
The present discussion surrounding Azorean tourism therefore contains a useful warning against confusing popularity with accessibility. A destination can be admired and still lose visitors. It can appear on travel lists, circulate through social media, receive international praise and possess extraordinary landscapes, while simultaneously becoming harder to reach for the ordinary traveler calculating the cost of a family vacation.
“The Azores do not need to create demand from scratch,” Moura said. “That demand exists, and the destination has the conditions to continue growing in value.”
The distinction between growing in numbers and growing in value may ultimately prove important. The future of Azorean tourism need not be imagined simply as an endless multiplication of visitors. It can also be understood through longer stays, stronger local economic impact, greater geographic distribution among the islands and a less severe dependence upon the summer season. But none of those ambitions escapes the fundamental condition identified by AHRESP.
Before a visitor can sleep in an Azorean hotel, eat in an Azorean restaurant, walk an Azorean trail or discover one of the smaller islands, there must first be a seat on an airplane at a price that makes the journey possible.
For islands, every journey begins with distance. The economic challenge is making certain that distance does not become a wall.
Based on a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director. Photos in DI.