Originally Posted by
Tafflyer
Please don't misunderstand. I live mostly in Portugal these days and love the Portuguese and their way of life.
However, TAP at LIS really feels like a Portuguese operation with all the organisational "flair" that comes with it. Don't you love parking at an airbridge just to find the terminal entrance blocked off an you have to walk down stairs to a waiting bus. Don't you then love how you can see where the bus needs to drive but it then drives once all around the terminal to get there. Don't you love the priority boarding signs which sometimes point left and sometimes right, but then the gate agents getting confused and ordering people into the wrong lines. Don't you love the gate announcements where the Portuguese and English language versions contradict each other. I could go on and on, and it sounds negative but it still feels warm, friendly and well meant. I'm sure that US-Brazilian has no idea how his airlines home hub really works.
Unfortunately I tend to agree - the airline runs ok, but could be really optimized and made better both financially and for customers if all these small things are taken into account. TAP does not know how to do irrops, and they suck at customer service, except their social media team which is truly awesome!
A lot of this has to do with the fact that it was government-owned, and not really run like a truly commercial operation until very recently. The company culture stinks of mediocrity, and the few awesome people who try harder aren't really recognized/promoted. We (customers) will have to wait until most of these mediocre middle managers are replaced by those who are really interested in changing the airline and have a customer-service-focused outlook or until the company somehow manages to change its company culture for the better, which can't come soon enough.
BTW. My biggest pet peeve is not with TAP but with Groundforce (owned by TAP), which takes forever to open the door once the airplane is parked. If the airline was more customer-service-focused they'd realize that the minutes that are spent after the plane is parked feel like hours. They've already "improved" the baggage claim experience, by increasing the walking time to the baggage claim (this is one reason why buses take forever to get to the terminal).
I have a recent story about this... In December I had to connect in LIS from DT to TP on 2 separate tickets with only 2h05 between the flights in the early AM. The DT flight landed 15 minutes late. From the time the door opened, to the time I was in a taxi took 35 minutes, but only because I managed to get on the biz class bus, and cut the line at passport control. Otherwise it would have taken a good 45-50 minutes. It took me only 30 minutes from the time I got into a taxi, to go home in central Lisbon, change into different clothes and come back to the airport curb.