PhilFAQS

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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It’s always good to be able to write about our local airlines here in the Philippines … especially when things just seem to be improving.  I learned something in some sort of Principles of Management course that said most managers make the mistake of telling their workers all their strong points and then souring the moment by throwing out a "but you could do better ‘zinger’" at the end of the conversation.  I’ve been guilty of that often myself, so let me try to bring this little update into good management standards.

Philippine Airlines: This is the national airline of the Philippines and is both an international and important domestic carrier.  I’m pretty sure many will have read that last month the US FAA placed PAL on it’s special ‘watch list’ of carrier who are not living up fully to FAA standards.  This mainly involved problems here in the Philippines with the ATO (Air Transportation Office) an arm of the Department of Commerce which most closely corresponds with the FAA’s role in the United States.  It caused a tremendous ‘smoke and light’ show here in the government, with the president firing the head of the ATO and a whole lot of head shaking and finger pointing going on.  Not much else transpired, though.  Will the problems get fixed soon?  I wouldn’t bank on it.  But the issues don’t really have any direct safety implications and in my view, PAL is as safe to fly as ever … so don’t go canceling your tickets and postponing your trip just because of what mainly amounts to bureaucratic wrangling.  If you’re a regular reader (and if you aren’t may I ask you to subscribe, please?) you’ll know that PAL is not one of my recommended carriers anyway, especially since my last trip on them, so you really should be buying your tickets on another airlines … in my opinion.

OK, that’s all the bad stuff.  Some good news is due, and here comes some:

 Pacific Pearl Airways is the newest airline in the country, based in Subic Bay Free Port in Zambales. They are the first passenger airline to operate in Subic. Starting last December 19 regular flights from Subic to Boracay (via Kalibo), Davao, Cebu and Manila were initiated. One can fly direct from Subic to Davao using the B737-200 Advance aircraft. for reservations call or text: Manila: 02.879.3375, Globe: 0916.383.1545, Subic: 047.252.8312, Smart: 0918.524.0608.  I haven’t yet flown these guys so this is for information only, but I certainly welcome competition and it is great that someone is now serving Subic (the former US Navy base).  The airport there is well equipped and Subic is close to some great beach resort areas that are nowhere near as crowded as the better known places down south, like Boracay.  My friend Bob will no doubt be happy to see yet another airline offering direct service to Davao as well.

SEAIR (South East Asian Airlines) is a local carrier I haven’t written about before.  based in Cebu, they have been around a few years now and fly mainly 32 passenger turboprops to many of the Philippines smaller tourist destinations.  Again a company I haven’t used, but they have a good reputation and I’m bringing them up here now because they are yet another airlines that is now serving Clark.  I’m really happy to see all the activity there, Clark is going to be a very important hub as time goes on and it is so refreshing to see airlines taking the big step of not serving the over-crowded, tourist-hostile NAIA.  Any day you can fly somewhere and bypass NAIA is a good day for flying to me.

Cebu Pacific.  hardly a newcomer to this site, I’ve written often about Cebu Pacific and they are hands-down my favorite carrier in the Philippines.  Today I’m updating them because boy, have they been busy.  Just a few months ago they added quite a few new international routes and now more are opening up.  Of particular interest are direct South Korea and Hong Kong flights to Cebu and Davao.  All the more well know international carriers have their problems with serving the Philippines from their major hubs, like Hong Kong.  With these locations being served by Cebu pacific now it makes a lot of sense to book flights to Hong Kong on a transpacific carrier and then book your final Philippines destination via Cebu Pacific … possibly avoiding an overnight in dear old Manila and other travel trials and tribulations.  Recommended.

No more excuses, fly and have fun!

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