Lisbon will be "the first city in southern Europe to have direct flights to and from San Francisco," announced Portugal’s prime minister at a meeting of investors in San Francisco.
The prime minister announced the new TAP service, which is scheduled to start in 2019, as part of a pitch for new investment for Portuguese tech companies.
António Costa drew on the similarities between the two cities, including the principal bridges and the surfing opportunities.
The prime minister said that Portugal "is the west coast of Europe," in an allusion to the west coast of the United States, suggesting that the business creation environment is similar in both countries.
Mentioning successful Portuguese startups, the PM focussed on Farfetch, which operates in the online luxury goods business, Aptoide, an independent app store on the Android system, Feedzai, an electronic commerce fraud detection company, Talkdesk, which provides cloud solutions for customer contact centres, Vision-Box, specialising in electronic identity recognition, and Unbabel, a translation platform that uses artificial intelligence.
According to António Costa, contact between the two west coasts will be easier as TAP will have direct flights between Lisbon and California in 2019, making the Portuguese capital, "the first southern European city to have direct flights to and from San Francisco."