The Ponta Delgada Chamber of Commerce and Industry is calling for a major increase in the resources devoted to promoting the Azores, proposing an annual Visit Azores budget of at least €15 million between 2027 and 2029. The organization argues that stronger marketing must be accompanied by better execution, sustained work in key international markets and a long-term strategy for maintaining and attracting air routes.
Tourism does not begin when a visitor steps from an airplane onto an Azorean runway. It begins months earlier, sometimes thousands of kilometers away, when a destination enters a traveler’s imagination and becomes a journey worth making. For the Ponta Delgada Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIPD), representing businesses on São Miguel and Santa Maria, the Azores are not investing enough in that first and increasingly competitive stage of the journey.
In its contribution to the preparation of Visit Azores’ 2027 Activity Plan and Budget, the organization, headed by Gualter Couto, is proposing what it describes as a change of scale: an annual tourism-promotion budget of no less than €15 million, incorporated into a stable three-year strategy covering 2027 through 2029. The Chamber considers the approximately €8 million approved for 2026 inadequate in the present environment and is especially critical of what it says has been poor and incomplete budget execution. According to the CCIPD, only about half of the available funding has been executed, while the Region confronts reduced air capacity, weakening demand, persistent seasonality and increasingly aggressive competition from other destinations.
Under its proposal, at least €7 million annually would be reserved specifically for marketing and destination-promotion campaigns, with implementation beginning in January rather than later in the tourism calendar. That timing is important to the Chamber’s argument: promotional resources have greatest value when campaigns are planned and contracted early enough to influence travel decisions rather than spent after the critical booking periods have passed. The CCIPD therefore wants the larger budget accompanied by a target of 100 percent execution and regular evaluation of results.
The proposed geographic strategy looks deliberately beyond the summer months. In addition to Portugal, the Chamber identifies the United States and Canada—markets with direct air connections—as priorities, while also calling for stronger promotion in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy. Although several of those European markets lack direct Azores connections, the CCIPD argues that they are accessible through Portugal’s national carrier. Brazil and Mexico are identified as emerging markets in which the Azores should gradually build a presence.
Yet the Chamber’s argument is that advertising alone cannot compensate for inadequate accessibility. It is therefore calling for a separate 2027–2029 multi-year Route Attraction and Development Plan, supported by dedicated financing. Crucially, the objective would not simply be to announce new routes. Existing connections would also need to be consolidated and, wherever viable, extended across longer periods of the year. In an island destination, tourism promotion and aviation policy are inseparable: creating demand is of limited value if travelers cannot reach the islands at competitive prices and convenient times.
The CCIPD also advocates a more permanent Azorean presence in major tourism-generating markets. In addition to the work already carried out by Turismo de Portugal, it wants consideration given to destination-specific representation capable of maintaining continuous relationships with tour operators, travel agents, airlines and the media. Such a structure, it argues, could support campaigns while simultaneously helping develop the air accessibility on which those campaigns ultimately depend.
Although the Chamber directly represents São Miguel and Santa Maria, it stresses that the proposed investment should serve the entire archipelago. That distinction matters. Successful tourism policy for the Azores cannot be measured only by increasing the number of visitors arriving on the largest island during the busiest months. The larger challenge is to distribute demand more effectively across seasons and, where accessibility permits, across islands, allowing tourism to contribute more consistently to employment and business sustainability throughout the year.
The proposal comes at a moment when recent tourism and transportation indicators have intensified debate about the sector’s direction. The CCIPD’s prescription is clear: 2027 should begin a more predictable, adequately financed and genuinely multi-year strategy in which destination marketing, air-route development and international representation operate as parts of the same policy rather than as isolated initiatives. Its criticisms of previous spending and execution are the Chamber’s assessment, but the larger question it raises is difficult to avoid: how much must an island destination invest simply to remain visible in an increasingly crowded international marketplace?
For the Azores, the answer cannot be found in promotion alone. The photograph that inspires a traveler, the campaign that places the islands before a new audience and the aircraft that finally crosses the Atlantic are parts of the same journey. The challenge for 2027 and beyond will be to ensure that the Azores are not only admired from afar, but sufficiently visible, connected and accessible for that admiration to become arrival.
Based on a story in Diário dos Açores-Paulo Viveiros, director. Photo from Novidades.