Delayed or cancelled flight from Lisbon

Ground-handling strikes have been the recurring local cause. Portugal's labour ministry, through its DGERT office, published minimum services for a strike at Portway, which handles flights at Lisbon and Porto, on 11 December 2025, and for strikes at SPdH/Menzies, Portway and ANA, the airport operator, on 3 June 2026. The European Commission says strikes by air traffic controllers or airport staff may be extraordinary, and that a strike by the airline's own staff is not; handling companies working for an airline are not addressed directly, so make the claim and let the airline prove its case.

What pays: a strike by the airline's own pilots or cabin crew, which the EU Court of Justice ruled in 2021 is not extraordinary, and ordinary technical faults. What may not: weather that makes flying unsafe, air traffic control restrictions and bird strikes. An airline can blame a problem that hit the same aircraft earlier in the day only if it shows a direct link to your delay.

Ask at the gate or your airline's desk for meal vouchers, and for a new flight if you are cancelled. If you are flying Ryanair, Vueling, Volotea, Transavia, Wizz Air, Eurowings or Norwegian from Terminal 2, know that it closes from 00:30 to 03:30, and that Terminal 1 lets in only passengers with a boarding pass or booking between 00:30 and 03:00. If your flight is put back to the next day, the airline owes you a hotel and the transport to it.

On one booking, the delay is measured where you finally land, and the distance is from where your journey started to your final destination, not the legs added up. So a Porto to Lisbon to New York booking that lands at JFK 4 hours late is a long-haul claim, even if the late leg was the short one. Separate bookings are separate flights. Missing a connection because security was slow, or because you were not at the gate, does not count.

Claiming yourself costs nothing. Send the claim to the airline that operated the flight, using its own claim form, with your booking reference and the times you actually arrived. If it says no, or has not replied within six weeks, complain to ANAC, Portugal's civil aviation authority, free of charge, within 3 years of the flight; the official gov.pt page explains how.

Flying to the UK on a UK or EU airline, your flight is also covered by the UK rules, and if you go to court in England, Wales or Northern Ireland the limit is 6 years (5 in Scotland). You can be paid only once for the same disruption, so claim under the EU rules that apply to a flight from Portugal.

Or hand it to AirHelp, which works on a no win, no fee basis: if it wins, it keeps 35% of the compensation including VAT, plus a further 15% if it has to go to court; if it does not win, you pay nothing. Keep your booking reference and boarding pass, screenshots of the delay or cancellation messages, the reason the airline gave you, and receipts for anything you bought while you waited.

New EU rules, Regulation (EU) 2026/2202, apply from 23 October 2027; for any flight before then, today's rules on this page apply.