Cebu Pacific sees tough road ahead

MANILA, Philippines — Cebu Pacific, the country’s largest budget carrier, expects a tough road ahead towards recovery, but is confident it will be able to conquer 2021 better.

“As Cebu Pacific gradually expands its network in coordination with local governments, the goal in mind is to serve our customers and make flying in the new normal safe, convenient, and affordable,” Cebu Pacific president and CEO Lance Gokongwei said yesterday.

“It will definitely be a tough road ahead, but we take heart that we will be able to conquer 2021 better,” he said.

Gokongwei earlier said the airline is expected to lose almost P25 billion this year as a result of unprecedented events outside the control of the corporation brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cebu Pacific said travel restrictions, both local and abroad, have led to abrupt reduction in passenger traffic for the airline and casts uncertainty over the near-term prospects of the corporation despite its market leadership.

Further, it said the lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country led to cancellation of flights across the airline’s entire network.

Cebu Pacific vice president for marketing and customer experience Candice Iyog said the airline, however, is poised to increase this month its operations to 16 percent of its pre-COVID network from only 10 percent from June to November as more domestic destinations reopened.

“We restarted commercial operations in June and we’re now increasing our flights and we’ll be operating close to 16 percent of our pre-COVID network this December because we believe that we are ready,” she said.

In order to kickstart travel and tourism, Iyog said Cebu Pacific strictly follows three key steps, which are sanitation, tracing and testing.

“Over the past few months, we as an industry have been working hard to ensure that we have all these things in place in Cebu Pacific,” she said.

However, Iyog said lot of things are still needed to be put in place to help accelerate the recovery of tourism and air travel, one of which is a standardized set of requirements.

“I think that one of the things that would make it move a little bit faster is having a simplified and standardized set of requirements for domestic travel,” she said.

“As it is today, there’s a lot that our passengers have to think about before traveling, and we do want to build the trust and confidence for people to start traveling. And so if we can make it easier for people by making it simpler for them so they can start moving around, then I think that would be the first thing,” Iyog said.