TAP Air Portugal selects consultancy, boosts N America ops

Following the European Commission’s approval of state aid to TAP Air Portugal (TP, Lisbon), the airline has now settled on a consultancy to help it prepare a restructuring plan which will then be presented to the commission. Boston Consulting Group has been selected to elaborate the plan, the chairman of the group’s board of directors, Miguel Frasquilho, revealed in an internal memo to employees, seen by Portugal’s Lusa News Agency. “Boston Consulting Group, a consultant selected for the elaboration of the aforementioned plan and to support TAP until its approval at the community levels, will start its work on August 17,” the message said. “We want this restructuring plan to become a true TAP Recovery Plan. The times we are facing, and which are coming, are not, nor will be, easy. But, working together and united, we will overcome these difficulties and ensure the sustainable future of our TAP,” Frasquilho added. On July 21, four days after Portugal’s government approved a state rescue loan for the airline of up to EUR1.2 billion euros (USD1.4 billion), Pedro Nuno Santos, the country’s infrastructure minister, said TAP would hire a human resources consultancy to “support” the restructuring process and “assess” the company’s managers. The objective, he explained, was for the consultancy to get to know the company, the staff, and the skills and experience they have. He stressed that it was TAP itself that had initiated the process of choosing the consulting company. But is up to the government to select a company to find a new chief executive to succeed Antonoaldo Neves, he added. In related news, TAP Air Portugal will resume flights by October to all nine of the airports in North America it operated to before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, restarting links between Lisbon and Chicago O’Hare (2x weekly), New York JFK (daily), and San Francisco, CA (2x weekly). It already flies from Lisbon to six North American airports, Boston (3x weekly), Miami Int’l (3x weekly), New York Newark (3x weekly), Washington Dulles (2x weekly), Montréal Trudeau (3x weekly), and Toronto Pearson (3x weekly), the ch-aviation capacities module shows, as well as Porto-Newark (1x weekly) and between Ponta Delgada in the Azores and Boston (3x weekly). It plans to add frequencies to the two Newark routes in September.