I've tried to book a ticket with TAP and the payment through payPal didn't go through. I have a booking number that shows a ticket in my name, but no payment made. The email from TAP said to contact the airline to complete the booking within 24 hours. Should I consider this booking closed after 48 hours? In other words, can I ignore this booking now and book other things, or does TAP have a claim on it? Any advice appreciated.

Call Tap to delete the (unticketed) reservation before you make a new booking. Until the reservation auto-cancel due to no payment or is deleted, risk is that the payment is somehow processed and ticket issued.

You can check the reservation on the Tap webpage.

Is it possible for TP to take the money using the payment details you provided them at the time of the booking? If yes, I would be careful about ignoring it for the reason outlined above by SK AAR. If the account is empty or otherwise unreachable, creating a new booking should not be an issue. Beware that calling TAP nowadays typically involves queuing for a very long time (> 1 hour in my recent experience).

This past weekend TAP was offering a "Cyber Weekend" promotion of a 20% discount on intra-Europe fares. My fiancee and I decided to take advantage of this to make an online booking for a trip to Porto Santo. On Saturday we booked a round trip OPO-PXO for the two of us in September 2022. We completed the reservation and made three attempts to pay, one by credit card, one by debit card and one by MultiBanco. All three failed with no explanation as to why. We then telephoned TAP to try to pay that way. Their auto-answering system offers an option to pay for a booking made online which I take as an implicit acknowledgement that online payment for bookings does not work reliably. We waited on hold for about an hour then gave up using an option to request a callback. No callback ever came. On Sunday, once the first booking had timed out after 24 hours, we made a new identical booking and tried again to pay for it online this time by credit card (a different one), PayPal and again MultiBanco. And again none worked. We telephoned again, waited half an hour for an agent and then gave up for good. How can they make it so difficult for people to give them money?!?!?

Reading this thread I learn that waiting over an hour is to be expected. I have been flying TAP frequently over the past ten years and on the whole have been very pleased with them. But I am far from happy now.