TAP's own-metal award table stops being a chart — every cell is now a floor
Eleven weeks after repricing its Star Alliance chart, TAP changed the kind of document it publishes. The own-metal table effective 28 July is titled 'Award Ticket Values From' and every cabin column is headed 'from' — 71 cells, all minimums. Lisbon to North America in business reads from 135,000 miles one-way, against the 63,000 this desk carried through July.
TAP Air Portugal devalued twice in eleven weeks, and the second one is the interesting one — not because of a number, but because of a noun.
On 4 May, Miles&Go repriced its Star Alliance award chart: India to Asia went from 40,000/60,000 to 50,000/70,000, the Gulf was carved out of the Asia zone into a dearer Middle East band, and Europe and North America both went to 80,000/125,000. That was an ordinary devaluation. A chart got worse, and it was still a chart.
The table TAP published for its own metal, effective 28 July 2026, is not. It is titled “Award Ticket Values From (one way)”, and above each of its two cabin columns — Economy and Business — sits the word from. All 71 published cells are floors. TAP may price above any of them, on any date, for any reason, and nothing in the document says otherwise.
The number that died
Lisbon to North America in business now reads from 135,000 miles one-way.
This desk carried 63,000 for that burn through July. The community guides documented roughly 100,000 under the immediately-prior chart. TAP did not archive the predecessor PDF and the desk will not pretend to quote it — but against either figure the point stands, and it is a brutal one: the new floor sits above every fixed price anyone can evidence. The cheapest this redemption can now be is dearer than the most it used to cost.
The rest of the long-haul table is priced in the same register. Portugal to Brazil is from 135,000 in business, Venezuela from 161,000, Angola and Mozambique from 160,000.
The quirk worth knowing
Economy is where the table gets strange, and briefly generous.
Mainland Portugal to North America floors at 29,000 miles. But start in Europe and connect over Lisbon and it floors at 19,000 — from Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland or Luxembourg (“Europe 1”), from Austria, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechia or Sweden (“Europe 2”), or from Spain and North Africa. Adding a positioning segment takes 10,000 miles off the transatlantic economy floor.
In business the discount reverses — those same origins cost 137,000 to 140,000 against Portugal’s 135,000 — so the trick is an economy-only artefact of how TAP zoned its feeder markets. Note also that carrier surcharges are the same cash either way, which punishes an economy seat proportionally far more than a business one.
Short-haul, meanwhile, floors cheap: 1,990 miles for a mainland Portugal domestic hop, 3,000 to Madeira or the Azores, 5,990 to “Europe 1”. Business on the same sectors is the comedy of the document — 18,000 miles domestic, and 51,000 between Madeira and the Azores.
Two more reasons a printed cell is not a price
From the same date, TAP is reported to be giving Gold and Navigator members “special rates” on awards for its own flights, applied automatically at login and not published anywhere — including in the table this post is sourced from, which says nothing about elite pricing, so mark that one reported-but-unverified. If it holds, the floors above are the non-elite floors and there are lower ones nobody publishes.
And the table simply omits 18 of the 55 possible zone pairs — no intra-Europe award that never touches Portugal, no North America to Brazil, no transatlantic-to-Africa. Those are pairs TAP does not sell, not pairs to interpolate.
What it means from India
Doubly, structurally annoying. No Indian card feeds Miles&Go directly. Every TAP mile in an Indian account arrived through a hotel hop — Marriott Bonvoy at 3:1 (better with the 5,000-per-60,000 bonus), Accor ALL at 2:1, IHG at 5:1 — and then started a hard three-year countdown the moment it landed. Paying a 3:1 haircut for miles whose headline burn just moved to a floor of 135,000 is not a plan; it is a way to lose twice.
One piece of good news, such as it is: our award board doesn’t move. All 1,626 TAP options we price are Star Alliance partner awards drawn from the separate May table, and not one corridor we cover begins or ends in Lisbon or Porto. The own-metal devaluation lands entirely on the Miles&Go guide, which now carries from-floors and no cents-per-mile claim on any of them — because you cannot compute a rate against a number that is only a promise not to charge less.