The Azores Local Lodging Association says Ryanair’s reduced presence has meant more than fewer airline seats: it has weakened competition, increased pressure on fares and diminished the islands’ visibility among independent travelers. João Pinheiro warns that the deeper question is not simply how many tourists arrive, but how widely tourism income reaches Azorean families and businesses.
For an island, distance is never merely geography. It is an economic condition. Every visitor who sleeps in a village house, rents a car, enters a restaurant, joins a whale-watching excursion or buys something from a neighborhood shop must first accomplish the same essential act: cross the ocean. And when the number, frequency or affordability of those crossings changes, the consequences travel far beyond the airport. They reach accommodations, cafés, taxis, activity companies, shops and families whose small businesses have become part of the Azorean tourism economy.
That is the larger warning being sounded by the Azores Local Lodging Association (ALA) as the sector confronts a significant decline in 2026. Between January and July, Local Lodging—Alojamento Local, or AL—registered 7.6 percent fewer overnight stays and 9.2 percent fewer guests, representing approximately 85,000 lost overnight stays compared with the same period in 2025.
For ALA representative João Pinheiro, the most visible explanation is the reduction in low-cost air capacity following Ryanair’s withdrawal of its Azorean base and contraction of operations.
But his argument is considerably broader than one airline.
A Seat on an Airplane Is Also a Place in the Market
“When we remove that capacity from the market, the effects are not limited to the number of seats,” Pinheiro explains. “We reduce competition and prices tend to rise.”
For Azorean tourism businesses trying to sell the destination internationally, that difference can be decisive. Travelers considering the islands are rarely comparing the Azores only with themselves. They are weighing airfare, accommodation and accessibility against Madeira, the Canary Islands and numerous other destinations.
Pinheiro identifies another consequence that is more difficult to quantify but potentially just as important: visibility.
A large low-cost airline does not merely transport passengers. Its website, mobile application, advertising campaigns and booking searches repeatedly place destinations before millions of consumers. Some travelers discover a destination precisely because an inexpensive flight appears before them.
With the loss of that commercial presence, Pinheiro argues, the Azores lost not only seats and competitive pressure on fares but also an important mechanism through which the islands were continuously presented to potential European visitors.
In the digital tourism economy, therefore, an airline route is also an advertisement.
Madeira and a Troubling Contrast
The association points to Madeira as a comparison that deserves attention. In July, Local Lodging overnight stays in Madeira increased 8.9 percent, while the Azores recorded a 4.5 percent decline—a difference of 13.4 percentage points. During the first seven months of 2026, Madeira surpassed 7.5 million overnight stays and continued to grow.
Pinheiro believes Madeira has more fully embraced tourism as an instrument of economic development, while the Azores remain more ambivalent about the sector.
The comparison should nevertheless be interpreted carefully. Madeira and the Azores possess different tourism markets, aviation networks, accommodation structures and patterns of demand, and the statistics alone do not establish that air connectivity is the sole cause of their divergent performance.
Pinheiro himself acknowledges that aviation cannot explain everything. But in an archipelago where virtually every tourist must arrive by air, he argues, accessibility cannot be treated as simply one variable among many. It is the condition that makes nearly all the others possible.
Counting Airlines Is Not Enough
The Regional Government has pointed to a substantial network during the 2026 IATA summer season: 16 airlines, more than 30 routes and connections with 12 countries.
Pinheiro does not dispute the importance of those numbers. He questions whether they tell enough.
“Counting airlines and routes does not tell us how many seats we actually have, at what frequency, for how many months and at what price,” he argues.
According to figures cited by the association from the Ponta Delgada Chamber of Commerce and Industry, approximately 94,000 annual seats remained unreplaced following the closure of Ryanair’s base, while a study presented this year estimated that Ryanair had transported between 103,000 and 119,000 tourists annually to the Azores.
The uneven performance of accommodation sectors raises additional questions. In July, hotels on Terceira grew 8.9 percent while Local Lodging declined 12.6 percent. On São Miguel—which represents 64.4 percent of regional AL activity—Local Lodging fell 4.7 percent.
Pinheiro is careful not to claim that organized tour operations alone caused this divergence; available statistics do not establish such a direct relationship. But he believes the numbers justify asking whether an increasing share of available air capacity is feeding organized tourism circuits rather than the independent traveler who books a flight and accommodation separately. It is an important distinction because different travelers distribute their money differently.
The Traveler Who Builds a Journey
For ALA, the independent visitor occupies a particularly important place in the economic ecology created by tourism.
This traveler buys an airline ticket directly, selects a Local Lodging property, rents a vehicle, books an excursion, eats at restaurants, shops locally and constructs an itinerary independently. Tourism revenue consequently passes through numerous hands rather than remaining concentrated within a smaller number of businesses. Pinheiro calls this the “democratization of tourism income.”
It is not, he stresses, an argument against hotels or tour operators. ALA wants hotels to grow and remain profitable and recognizes organized operators as important to the destination. The concern is preserving an ecosystem in which hotels, Local Lodging, rural tourism, tour operators and independent travelers can coexist.
Local Lodging has been especially important because it allowed tourism to reach places where a hotel might never have been economically viable. A house or small property converted into visitor accommodation could bring tourism revenue into parishes and municipalities previously located outside the traditional visitor economy. The result was not simply more beds. It was a different geography of tourism.
Winter Is the Real Test
The association believes the immediate priority should be rebuilding competitive air capacity, particularly during the low season.
Pinheiro argues that the Regional Government should actively negotiate with airlines rather than wait for carriers to propose new services. He also favors flexibility: if an economically viable airline wishes initially to serve only one island or route, the Azores should consider the opportunity rather than lose it because a solution cannot immediately benefit every island equally.
The proposed Azores Air Route Development Fund, now being regulated after being advocated by ALA and others, could help support new routes and marketing initiatives, with assistance tied to net increases in capacity. Pinheiro sees such a mechanism as particularly useful over the medium and long term because it can reduce the initial commercial risk faced by airlines testing new connections.
For the immediate challenge, however, he argues that national institutions, including Turismo de Portugal, should also help restore competitiveness. And he offers an important warning against replacing one dependency with another. “The objective should not be to replace Ryanair with another Ryanair and create dependency again,” he says. Instead, the islands should seek competition through multiple airlines, markets and routes, with particular attention to winter.
What Kind of Tourism Do the Azores Want?
Behind the statistics lies a much larger debate than the future of Local Lodging. It is about the kind of tourism economy the Azores wish to build.
A destination can increase passenger numbers while allowing economic benefits to become increasingly concentrated. It can also pursue a model in which visitors disperse across islands, municipalities, accommodations and businesses, allowing tourism expenditure to circulate more widely through the regional economy.
The challenge is not to manufacture a false contest between hotels and Local Lodging, between tour operators and independent travelers, or between traditional airlines and low-cost carriers. Each can serve a purpose. Resilience may lie precisely in diversity rather than dependence. That is why Pinheiro’s most consequential argument may not concern Ryanair at all. It concerns what remains in the islands after the airplane departs.
A tourist who arrives is counted once at the airport. But the economic life of that arrival may be counted repeatedly: in a room in a village, a rental car, a restaurant table, a boat excursion, a museum ticket, a café, a small shop and the income of an Azorean family.
The true measure of tourism, then, is not simply how many wings appear over an Azorean runway. It is how far the prosperity carried by those wings travels once it touches the ground. For islands separated by the Atlantic, access will always begin with an airplane. But success begins afterward—when the visitor’s journey becomes, in some small way, part of the economic life of the people who live there.
Based on an interview in Diário Insular-José Lourenço, director. Phots from DI and ALA.