The airport is a great place to start practicing your Portuguese. Most airline staff are bilingual and will be very forgiving of your mistakes and accent. Just go for it and apologize later.
Let's do a typical check-in dialog:
AGENTE: Bom dia senhor. Passaporte, por favor. PASSAGEIRO: Aqui está. Eu vou para Recife. AGENTE: O senhor tem bagagem para check-in? PASSAGEIRO: Tenho só a minha bagagem de mão. AGENTE: Ok. Aqui está sua passagem. Seu assento é 33B. PASSAGEIRO: Qual é o portão de embarque? AGENTE: É A2… lá na frente. PASSAGEIRO: Obrigado!
If you pull this off the reservations desk is going to tell you how amazing you, and your Portuguese is.
Learning travel portuguese phrases is just a matter of being not-afraid.
o visto
The word for visa is visto - not to be confused with the past participle of ver (seen). A travel visa is a temporary permit to be inside the country.
a passagem
There are many different words for ticket, but an airline ticket is always passagem.
a bagagem
A mala is a suitcase, and it's fine to say malas, but when talking about several bags it's more common to say bagagem.
o portão
We say gate, they say port = portão.
embarque
Embarque comes from the verb, embarcar.
decolar
I can't think about the verb decolar without hearing the jingle of the company with the same name, decolar.com (see video below to have this verb forever embedded into your memory).
assento
It took me a long time to realize that a seat in a plane is not called a cadeira but rather assento.
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