Transavia has substantially enlarged its planned Cabo Verde operation before a single flight has departed, filing schedule changes that take the service from two weekly flights to five when it launches in late October 2026.
What changed
The airline had originally filed a two weekly Amsterdam–Faro–Ilha do Sal–Amsterdam routing, sending its aircraft via southern Portugal. That plan has been dropped. In its place, Transavia will fly to Cabo Verde directly from Amsterdam and will serve two islands rather than one.
Amsterdam–Ilha do Sal begins on 25 October 2026 with three weekly flights using the Airbus A321neo, operating as HV5781 outbound and HV5782 on the return.
Separately, from 26 October 2026, Transavia adds a weekly triangular rotation as HV5783: Amsterdam–Ilha do Sal–Praia–Amsterdam, again on the A321neo. That service doubles to two weekly across two peak windows — from 17 December 2026 to 11 January 2027, and from 18 February to 25 March 2027.
Taken together, the schedule now stands at five weekly flights, against the two initially filed.
Dropping the Faro stop
The removal of the Faro technical and commercial stop is the more interesting structural change. Routing through southern Portugal shortens each individual sector, but it adds a landing, a turnaround and roughly an hour of ground time to every rotation. It also ties the Cabo Verde service to seat availability on the Faro leg.
Flying Amsterdam–Sal nonstop removes that complication. Passengers get a direct flight, the aircraft spends less of the day on the ground, and the schedule becomes easier to protect when something runs late.
Adding Praia
Serving Praia as well as Sal broadens the offer meaningfully. Sal is the established leisure gateway to Cabo Verde, home to the resort beaches that drive most northern European traffic to the archipelago. Praia, on the island of Santiago, is the national capital and a rather different market, with a stronger administrative, business and visiting-friends-and-relatives component alongside tourism.
Structuring Praia as the second stop on a triangular rotation is a sensible way to test that demand. It lets Transavia reach the capital without committing a separate aircraft rotation to it, and the routing can be unwound easily if the traffic does not appear.
The aircraft
All of the flying is scheduled on the Airbus A321neo, the largest member of the A320neo family. Its combination of range and seat count makes it well suited to this kind of mission: the Amsterdam–Cabo Verde sector is a long one for a narrowbody, running down the length of western Europe and out over the Atlantic to a point off the West African coast.
A decade ago a route of that length from the Netherlands would more naturally have called for a widebody or a stop en route. The current generation of long-range narrowbodies has changed that calculation, and the disappearance of the Faro stop from this particular schedule is a small, concrete illustration of the shift.
Seasonal shape
The frequency increases fall over Christmas and New Year and again in late winter — the two periods when northern European demand for reliable winter sunshine is highest. Cabo Verde's appeal to that market is straightforward: warm, dry weather at a time of year when much of northern Europe has neither, at a flying time considerably shorter than the Caribbean.
As with any schedule filed months ahead, the details may be adjusted before launch.
Sources: AeroRoutes. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. By Daniel Okafor.
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