Insider

✈️ €1.2B buys Lufthansa 44.9% of TAP. Is your 2027 airline deal ready for it?

Portugal picked Lufthansa over Air France-KLM for TAP on Wednesday. The deal won't close until 2028, and the last one took 40 months to reach corporate programmes. What to put in your 2027 airline contracts now.

Egor Karpovich

15 Oct 2026 — 5 min read

This week

On Wednesday, Portugal chose Lufthansa Group to buy 44.9% of TAP Air Portugal for €1.2 billion. Its offer was 16% higher than Air France-KLM's. The Portuguese state keeps 50.1% and employees get 5%. TAP brings nonstop flights to 14 Brazilian cities, with a 15th starting this month, plus Angola, Cape Verde, Senegal and Mozambique. Lufthansa Group already runs hubs in Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Brussels and Rome. Nothing changes for your travellers yet: the European Commission still has to approve the deal, and Portugal's finance minister expects the sale to complete in 2028. That is exactly when it matters for you. You are about to sign 2027 airline deals, and some of them will still be running when TAP's owners change. So should your 2027 contract assume TAP stays independent, or that it becomes part of Lufthansa?

Why it matters

1. For all of 2027, TAP is still a separate negotiation. The European Commission must approve the deal first, and Portugal's finance minister says the sale won't complete for 18 to 24 months. Until then, TAP flights won't count towards a Lufthansa Group deal, and a Lufthansa deal won't get you a TAP discount.

2. The last deal of this kind took 40 months to reach corporate programmes. Lufthansa signed for 41% of ITA Airways in May 2023. The deal completed in January 2025, after the Commission required remedies that brought in easyJet, IAG and Air France-KLM as competitors on some of ITA's routes. ITA flights only started earning points in PartnerPlusBenefit, Lufthansa Group's corporate programme for small and mid-sized companies, in September 2026. If TAP follows the same path, its corporate benefits arrive in 2029, not 2027.

3. You will have fewer airlines to play off against each other. Air France-KLM offered to make Lisbon its only southern European hub and lost. If you fly to Brazil or Portuguese-speaking Africa today, you may be quoting TAP against Air France-KLM or Lufthansa. Once the deal completes, two of those three will be tied together by ownership.

What this means for your program

Sign 12-month deals with TAP and Lufthansa Group for 2027, not multi-year ones. Add a clause that lets you review the terms if either airline changes owner. You want to renegotiate in 2028 from the volume you actually have, not from an old forecast.
Pull your 2026 spend by airline group and route before the account managers call. Look at Lisbon, Brazil and Africa separately. If TAP and Lufthansa together are a big share of your spend on those routes, that is your leverage.
Ask your Lufthansa account manager in writing when TAP flights will count towards your targets. "Not before the deal completes" is a useful answer: it tells you not to give anything up now in exchange for a combined deal.
Keep a second option priced on your Brazil and Africa routes. Even if you won't use it, a quote via another hub tells you whether your TAP or Lufthansa fare is actually competitive.

The numbers

€1.201 billion for 44.9%, which values TAP at €2.552 billion. The offer was 16% above Air France-KLM's. The state keeps 50.1% and 5% is reserved for employees. (Euronews, 14 Oct 2026)
18 to 24 months to complete. The deal needs European Commission approval, and Portugal's finance minister says the privatisation won't finish until 2028. (Euronews, 14 Oct 2026)
14 nonstop Brazilian cities, with a 15th starting in October 2026. TAP is already in Star Alliance but isn't part of the transatlantic joint venture between Lufthansa, United and Air Canada. Joining it would need a separate regulatory review. (Skift, 14 Oct 2026)
16.7 million passengers and €4.31 billion in revenue in 2025, with a net profit of €4.1 million. TAP lost €99.2 million in the first half of 2026. (Air Data News, 9 Apr 2026, Euronews)
ITA Airways timeline: signed 25 May 2023, completed 17 January 2025, earning PartnerPlusBenefit points from September 2026. (Lufthansa Group IR, Lufthansa Group newsroom, e-businesstravel.nl, 24 Sep 2026)

Two tools built exactly for this moment

You can't negotiate on volume you can't see. Most companies only learn their spend by airline group when they rebuild it from invoices, card statements and expense reports, usually just after the contract is signed.

Travel Code Expense Management →: receipt capture, automatic checks against your policy, and approval routing, with bookings and card transactions reconciled in one ledger. Flights booked through the platform and flights claimed on expenses end up in the same report, so you can see your spend by airline and route and export it to Excel before the RFP.
Travel Code Net-60 Card →: 60-day settlement at 0% interest, per-transaction visibility, and budget rules that auto-freeze at 80%. Every airline charge is visible line by line the same day, not when the statement arrives.

The bottom line

Lufthansa paid €1.2 billion for a network you probably use, and your travellers won't notice anything for at least a year. Your contracts will. 2027 is a transition year: TAP stays independent, Lufthansa Group keeps growing, and the combined deal arrives later than the sales pitch suggests. Sign short, measure your real volume on the routes this deal affects, and get the answer about combined targets in writing. Then in 2028 you negotiate with numbers instead of promises.

What's new at Travel Code

Did you know Travel Code shows where every fare comes from? Each flight in search results carries a badge, GDS, NDC, Direct or LCC, next to the airline logo. Handy when you are comparing the same route across channels. Admins choose who sees the badges: all employees, travel managers only, or nobody. (Changelog →)

A correction to Tuesday's issue

On Tuesday we told you to prepare for a French flight-crew strike from 17 to 21 October. On the evening of 9 October, before we sent it, the five unions suspended their strike notice after new commitments from the government on the pension reform. The suspension is conditional: the unions say they will strike again if the government doesn't publish the promised decree. We should have caught this before sending. Sorry. (SNPNC-FO, Infos Tourisme, 12 Oct 2026)

Sources

Travel Code helps corporate travel and finance teams see, control, and reconcile every dollar of trip spend in one platform. travel-code.com · Expense Management · Net-60 Card