Cebu Pacific Update
Last week I had occasion to use my old favorite Cebu Pacific for a trip to Davao City from Manila and return. I found that they are still a good airline and still pretty economical, but a few things have changed in the past few years since I used Cebu Pacific last.
Cebu Pacific has just about completed the upgrade of their entire fleet to new Airbus A319 and A320 aircraft. This is a great move in terms of passenger comfort, safety and dispatch reliability. Cebu Pacific did a creditable job for years with a fleet of mainly DC-9 jets but they were certainly long in the tooth and the DC-9 is a ground-loving airplane which made a lot of the smaller airports served by Cebu Pacific a bit "dicey" in my view, especially on wet runways. The A319/320 family is one of the safest and most reliable jets in current use and they are quite quiet (ever notice how many bloggers don’t seem to know the difference between these two words? 
)… I like them.
Cebu Pacific has gotten quite ‘economy-minded’. Baggage limits are low … although I had no trouble bringing back oodles of fruit in bags and crates from Davao. When I last flew Cebu Pacific they impressed me by even serving free cold drinks to passengers in the terminal waiting for the flight. Those days are apparently gone for ever. Not only do they even charge for soft drinks in the cabin, they fly past your seat as if they were getting paid to win a race, you have to practically trip up an attendant to even be allowed to part with your money. A significant downgrade in my view.
Fares are like a lot of things these days, bait and switch. I really don’t know what has happened to honesty in advertising and merchandising. The stated price when I made our reservations was about P 500, round trip. But tax, fuel surcharge and who knows what fees were tacked on to make the total price about P 2700 each. This does nothing for the airline’s image. It’s a sad sate of business affairs. i think I’ll lease a plane or two and start an airline advertising one peso fares anywhere .. then simply tack on as much as I care to at checkout in order to make a profit. I’ll piss off a lot of passengers by being underhanded, but I’ll make money … at least short term. Cebu Pacific is hardly alone in this practice, but it doesn’t make it right. be sure you know the full fare before you compare.
All-in, though, the fare, on last minute purchase is still cheap compared to buying a similar trip on a US airline. I tried purchasing the tickets online using my US credit card. No luck. Called my credit card company. Sure enough they had blocked the purchase, in the main because instead of identifying themselves as Cebu Pacific Airlines the company reports themselves to the credit card companies as Cebu Air Telephone Reservations, which truncates to Cebu Air Telephone on the credit card fraud department’s screen. The lady who blocked the transaction did so because she thought someone was trying to charge more than 4200 worth of air phone charges when there were no tickets shown to indicate I was flying. That’s just stupid. credit card fraud is a problem, dealing stupidly with the credit card companies just make sit worse.
Finally got the charge to go through and after no less than three phone calls got Cebu Pacific to email out eticket information. Not a very good example of customer service and sadly I did have to get my wife to make the last call … Cebu Pacific is just unable to deal with foreigners very effectively even though the words my wife used were identical to the words I used. Room for a ton of improvement there if they want to do more business.
Final note … the dear old Philippine Department of Tourism really should pay some attention to the mechanics of how people have to get around in this country rather than trying to attract yet another multi-million dollar hotel venture weekly. I’ve traveled domestically in at least 20 countries of the world and the Philippines is hands-down the most unfriendly to tourists. As a first step, the idiotic practice of extracting cash payments from travelers at the airport for airport fees needs to be stopped. The intelligent route is to roll these payments into the fares and make the airlines responsible for collecting and remitting. When you travel in say the US, you pay service fees like this for each airport … but the airline collects them … it’s part of the cost of doing business. It does not require gates, collectors, paper receipts and the ubiquitous "no change, sir" hassles. This would remove a significant bottleneck and remove millions of pesos per year from hands that may not always remit the money into the proper government coffers.
All in all, a great trip, but like everything else you have to factor in the reality that this is the Philippines. I live here and I like it, in general, but paradise … it is not.
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Your experience was very similar to mine. I had pointed out early in a reply to Bob & your podcast on Bob’s site that the fares were not what they seemed.
I could not reserve my flight online because no less than three credit cards would not go through their system. I also found the same to be true with PAL BTW. I had to place the reservation via a phone call, adding to the cost (the same card worked this way). And like you, to complete the transaction I had to call back (even more money) to get them to send the E-ticket. At least this only took one call, in addition to the original. They really need to get their credit card/online reservation fixed but no one seemed to even acknowledge there was a problem.
There was no free in-cabin service unlike the last time I flew with them but they did offer a free one way ticket and lunch (Jollibee) upon canceling the 12:30 flight from Manila to Davao. The cancellation caused quite an uproar and the re-ticketing renewed an intensified cutting, pushing and shoving experience. My return flight was fine and only 30 minutes late. Not too bad even for here. I MUCH prefer the Davao airport to the Manila Domestic. That’s probably stating the obvious though.
Thanks for the report, Randy. Indeed it seems our experience was very similar. Not much to say .. they certainly were a bargain compared with a similar flight in the US, but their customer service has gone way, way downhill. And using their website is a total waste of time … might as well call first and start the waiting cycle that much farther down the queue. They are what they are.
Need update from time to time on cebu pacific domestic flights promo or low fares
Thanks for visiting and for commenting, Marimae, but for both your request and others who want up-to-date information, I suggest you go direct to the airline’s own sites. They’re all listed in the individual airline pages and there’s no way I could possibly keep up with all the individual changes….