Zest Air seems to have a lot of trouble dealing with the airport at Caticlan.

Last week, a Zest Airways Xian MA-60 (RP-C8892) with 54 passengers overshot the runway, in a repeat of a similar, more damaging overshoot earlier this year. Unlike the previous incident where 3 of the 25 passengers were injured, no one was hurt . The incident, however, raises serious questions on the safety of the plane Zest Air uses, the airport in question, and the pilots involved in the crash.

The Xian MA-60s used by Zest Airways, a Chinese manufactured copy of the Russian Antonov An-26, a military light transport. Five of these aircraft were delivered in October 2008, and Zest Air placed an additional order of 6 planes last May. With the planes practically brand new (2 and 6 months old, respectively), and with neither Cebu Pacific nor PAL Express suffering similar problems with their comparable aircraft (using the ATR-72 and Bombardier Dash 8, respectively), questions are raised about the safety record of the plane itself.

A check with AviationSafety.Net reveals only 2 incidents with the Xian MA-60, excluding the latest incident but including the incident at Caticlan last January (the page lists 9 incidents including those for the older Xian Y-7, upon which the MA-60 was based). The first incident was with an Air Zimbabwe domestic flight in January 2008, caused by pilot error.

It is then difficult to determine whether the plane’s build quality could be questioned, but having had ridden one in a flight to Busuanga earlier this year, the Xian MA-60 has a peculiarity that I hadn’t noticed when I rode the ATR-72: it brakes really hard. This becomes important when considering that Godofredo P. Ramos Airport at Caticlan has a runway length of only 810 meters.

The length of the runway makes for very harrowing landings, as illustrated by various photos of approaches at the Caticlan airport. On one end of the runway, about 30 meters from its edge is a road (as seen in the crash photo above) frequented by tricycles and jeepneys. On the other end of the runway is a hill. There have been efforts to try and lengthen this runway, unfortunately, thwarted by “political wrangling at the local level”:

Local air carriers have long requested the [Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines] that the runway be lengthened either by extending Runway 06 to the sea or removing a hill at the end of Runway 24.

However the CAAP was not able to carry out the runway improvements because of political wrangling at the local level. [BusinessMirror]

A third angle is, of course, pilot error. In the January incident, the pilot of RP-C8893 undershot the runway and hit the perimeter fence of the runway (clearly visible in the photos shown). In this latest incident, the pilot overshot the runway, after requesting to land despite having a tail wind:

Initial investigation showed that when he asked for landing instructions, the pilot, Capt. Bernard Hervoso, was directed to Runway 06, the “active” runway at the time. However, it was reported that Hervoso requested to use Runway 24 instead.

The request was granted, although it would mean that the airplane would be landing with a tailwind.

Investigators are now verifying eyewitnesses reports that the plane landed almost at the middle of [the] runway. [BusinessMirror]

Only after a full investigation will we be able to get all the facts straight, and determine whether the crash was caused by human error or by safety deficiencies in the aircraft. Considering that there are more than 30 flights in and out of the Godofredo Ramos Airport everyday — being the gateway of Boracay (it is, in fact, the third busiest airport in Western Visayas) — the best long term solution would be to lengthen the runway once and for all. Only then will margins of error for the pilots be large enough to cancel out problems with braking, late touchdowns, or clearing perimeter fences.

We only hope that the government of the Municipality of Malay would care.

Photo of engine nacelle and propeller copyright the author, all rights reserved. Photo of Zest Airways RP-C8892 and Cebu Pacific RP-C7250 before touchdown at Godofredo P. Ramos Airport by Ryan Hemmings via Airliners.Net. Photo of RP-C8892 crashed in ditch by user MapLand of 101today.com/travel.

Maybe it’s just road rage from all the traffic that I’ve been going through lately, whether driving my (borrowed) car, riding a cab, or being a bus passenger myself, but I have always wondered: why the hell do we wonder why there’s so much traffic in EDSA, when an average of 40% of the road cannot be used by 80% of the vehicles?

You know what I’m talking about; it’s the dreaded yellow lanes in EDSA, wherein buses and jeepneys are free to ply in and out of, but once private vehicles and, more recently, taxi cabs, enter the MMDA boys come swooping down on you like pet vultures of The Great Pink BF.

Of course, nobody really questions the law because, hell, private vehicle owners? They’re rich! If they can afford a car, they should be able to afford a ticket from the MMDA! Unlike those poor bus drivers who can swerve in and out of them yellow lanes because — hey, it’s their job — and they have every right to cut into your lane because they’re "less fortunate" than you with your spanking brand new Chery QQ.

So, let’s review the kinds of laws Filipinos have written against the "more fortunate" because it’s just "rightful" for them and they give just advantage to the "less fortunate":

Yellow Lanes

Seriously, it’s impossible to find what the whole point of this godforsaken law, and the way the MMDA boys have twisted it the other way around — theoretically private vehicles should be allowed in the yellow lanes because, heaven forbid, the sidewalks and establishments are deep inside them! Why private vehicles are treated like UN forces crossing the 38th parallel towards Pyongyang, I still don’t understand.

Never mind if almost half of EDSA is unusable — creating enormous traffic jams on an already overloaded highway — for which the apparent remedy is U-turn slots and pink urinals. It ensures that those who cannot afford their own cars and the "less fortunate" bus and jeepney drivers ferrying them have a free hand in doing whatever they want as long as they’re in these beautiful golden stretches.

Taxes on books and electronics

Why is everyone making a hoot against this "great book blockade" thing? It’s meant to keep you rich kids from getting your unnecessarily expensive copies of Twilight! Save that for the beggar outside your campus gate instead!

And if you think this is the first time the government did it… na ah ah. Seriously, did you ever wonder why those laptops, digital cameras, cellphones, and other uber-gadgets are just oh so cheap in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan? It’s because the Philippines places high taxes on these dreaded devices! Dreaded, because everyone knows that only the uber rich can buy uber gadgets and henceforth they must be taxed! Never mind if everyone needs a cellphone these days, never mind if laptop computers actually empower the downtrodden by allowing access to the internet and therefore free flowing information, and never mind if digital cameras allow people to get rid of film cameras which, with the hazardous chemical content of both the manufacture of film and processing and development, leads to various forms of pollution. Never mind, never mind.

The Lina Law

The mother of all "social justice" laws, the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992 (RA 7279) [PDF] colloquially called the Lina Law "lays down the groundwork for a comprehensive and continuing urban development and housing program" and "addresses the right to housing of the homeless and underprivileged Filipino people." Quite a noble law, seeking to allow the "less fortunate" a level playing field at finding homes.

Of course, a lot of unscrupulous-though-less-fortunate people also use it to steal land; while the dramatized cinematic representation is of some cruel Doña riding a Mercedes ordering goons to beat the crap out of poor laborers arms linked with wives and kids tearfully crying while the bulldozer comes in, many times hardworking OFWs, scrimping on meals to save for their dream house, come home with the lots they bought in the last seafaring-tour-of-duty occupied by gin-drinking merry men. These "less fortunate" persons then brandish the Lina Law being on their side, drawing the "rich" OFW’s savings into attorney’s fees in a court battle to get the land he actually really owns.

Who should benefit from our laws?

While there are laws that benefit the downtrodden that are commendable and praiseworthy, the cliche must once again be evoked: the road to hell is paved, gold plated, and vacuum sealed fresh with good intentions. Any law that tips the balance from one sector of society to the other must have easy-to-invoke stop gaps that disallow the law to be abused by the benefiting sector, or render them moot when the needs addressed by the law have become irrelevant.

Only when the law benefits everyone, not just the downtrodden, can a society be really called just and equal.

Through the efforts of blogger Kevin Ray Chua, the issue caught the attention of Senator Mar Roxas, who sent a letter to Cebu Pacific asking them to explain the above incidents.

Finally, Cebu Pacific’s Guest Services Head Ivan Gaw was kind enough to respond regarding the said issue:

This incident had been an eye opener also for our company. With this incident, we revised our procedures for carriage of Deaf passengers and still not compromising safety. Since July 2008, Cebu Pacific accepts unlimited number of unescorted Deaf/ Mute guests in all of our aircrafts provided that they shall be properly briefed by our Cabin Attendants about safety, the use of seatbelt, oxygen mask, life vest, route to the nearest exit, etc. The only condition is that they must not be seated at any emergency exit rows.

…

I’m also happy to inform you that we are coordinating with the group of Sir Nonoy Concha and party for an awareness seminar about proper handling of passengers with disabilities. We are targeting mid-February. We also would want to include our learning’s from this awareness seminar to the front line training program. I am constantly in loop with them.

Rest assured that it’s not the intention of Cebu Pacific to discriminate anybody. We value all of our guest irregardless of gender, status, and condition. [Filipino Deaf from the Eyes of a Hearing Person]

Kudos to Cebu Pacific for their policy changes! I hope that this will set an example not only in the airline or transport industry, but to all industries and service providers, in understanding and handling the needs not only of the deaf but other persons with disabilities.

That wasn’t the end of story though: when we got back to Manila, the box of mangosteen we had was in shambles. Apparently it rained hard while the luggage was being loaded onto the plane, and parts of the carton box disintegrated. Several pieces of the 150-pesos-a-kilo mangosteen fruit fell out of the box, hopefully to be retrieved by airline cleanup crew so the darn things don’t go to waste.

This morning, something worse happened to one of my wife’s clients, part of a party of 27 people going to Bohol today. His cellphone went missing, from inside his luggage which was checked in for the 4:50 AM Cebu Pacific flight from Manila to Cebu. Fortunately his wallet and digicam, which were also in the bag, were not taken, but it’s absolutely alarming that you could lose valuables while your baggage is being handled by airport personnel. We’ll file a report with Cebu Pacific and NAIA 3, and perhaps with the Mactan International Airport when they come back from their Bohol trip on Wednesday.

What many people don’t realize is that the handling of checked in luggage is absolutely horrid and utterly unsafe to check luggage in, in any airport or with any airline in the world. Baggage handling is rough, with machines constantly and violently shoving, pushing, and tumbling your luggage around as it makes its way from the check-in counter to the plane, when baggage handlers will likewise pass them around like basketballs in a hurried bid to get the plane flying on time.

While you can opt to lock your luggage, it’s no guarantee that contents will not be lost, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that your luggage will arrive intact. Here are some guidelines to prevent luggage from getting lost and mishandled on your flights:

• Get some good pieces of luggage – Hard-cased and heavy duty luggages are expensive and all, but they’re quite sturdy and dependable hence their popularity. For hard-cased luggage, there’s also the guarantee that the bag won’t be squeezed in when tons upon tons of other luggage are put on top of it. Try buying luggage that can be contracted/expanded, depending on load, however, or ones with straps to hold down your things, as they are quite necessary as I’d point out in the next item.
• Use an appropriate-sized bag for your luggage – Use a bag that is just right for the job. A bag that’s too loosely packed will tend to be crushed and/or its contents will toss and tumble inside; a bag that’s too tightly packed might be torn apart at the zippers when additional weight is applied. Make sure you pack your bag just right. You could opt to look for luggage with straps that could hold down your stuff, however, so your things won’t fly around the luggage when they’re too loose.
• Do NOT check in your valuables and electronics – While several types of electronics (especially cellphones) are prohibited for in-flight use, it’s not worth risking having them thrown around in bags or luggage. This is especially true for laptops, where dropping and mishandling usually spells the bitter end for hard drives. Hand-carry your electronics, especially your laptops and cellular phones, as much as possible.
• Lock your luggage with padlocks – Buy a good, small padlock to keep your luggage from being opened up. One can never be sure that there is no airport personnel who won’t be tempted to swipe a nice cellphone or iPod if your bag’s zipper fails and unravels its contents. Unfortunately if you are traveling to and within the United States this might be a bad idea, since the Department of Homeland Security sees it fit to destroy each and every padlock in sight in a pathetic attempt to “prevent terrorism”. Of course, to make this step unnecessary, refer to the previous rule.
• Put identification on your luggage – Use hard-to-remove bag tags or labels to properly identify the owner of the luggage. I never realized how important this is until the incident in Davao: the backpack had no bag tag, and the airport employees had to rummage through my wife’s things to figure out who she was. Make their lives easier by indicating your name clearly on your bags.

Of course the best and safest way for circumventing the need for these is to pack light and have everything on your hand carry luggage. I still have to replicate Art’s amazing luggage crunching feat, which is especially difficult for a man with my large and bulky frame, but if there’s a will, there must be a way!

While the racetrack-like Elliptical Road in Quezon City rumbles with noise, fumes, and traffic, a few silent automobiles make their own rounds in the Quezon Memorial Circle that the road borders. Humbly seating four persons max, the curious rides called G Cars (in a pun-loaded attribution to their inventor, Gerry Caroro) can be hired for PHP30 per lap. Caroro laments, however, that he never intended his invention as an amusement park curiosity. He intended it to be the solution to the country’s dependence on imported oil, as well as reduce pollution in the metropolis.

Unfortunately Caroro has difficulty finding an investor for his invention, a plight shared with most of the country’s inventors. As any dutiful citizen of the Philippines tends to do, Ronald Talion of the Filipino Inventors Society blames the government for this:

“It’s already mandated under Republic Act Act 7459 (Inventors and Invention Incentives Act) and yet, for some strange reason, our inventors have to fend for themselves,” Talion noted.

“The only support we get is the P178,000 that is given to us every November to celebrate National Inventors Week (NIW). Obviously this is not enough, which is why a lot of my colleagues were forced to seek support from abroad,” he lamented. [Inquirer.Net]

An automotive industry that never was

The plight of Caroro’s fledgling effort to produce a viable automotive technology is but an addition to the tragic history of the country’s automotive industry, shared with its ubiquitous mode of transport and cultural icon: the jeepney. Originally coming from surplus and left-behind military jeeps, roofs were installed and lavish decorations applied to convert former war-wagons into colorful passenger vehicles able to seat six to ten people at a time. From the 60s until the 80s, a vibrant backyard industry emerged, where jeepneys and “owner-type” jeeps were manufactured as low-cost alternatives to lavish, large-engined American cars or their cheaper Japanese counterparts.

The jeepney manufacturing sector was never able to make it beyond “backyard” status to become a genuine car-manufacture industry, though. Beyond metal pressing and stamping, and fabrication of various “mods” to adorn and embellish each jeepney, they never went to the stage of standardization, efficient mass production, and assembly line automation. Over fifty years of jeepney manufacture remained in the realm of hand-pressed, hand-crafted, hand-painted methods. Moreover, it is peculiarly unclear if any two jeepneys are exactly alike, and it is even dubious if any of them had followed a clear cut blue print of any sort.

The last straw, however, is the country’s dependence on Japanese-made surplus engines. Despite whatever expertise local mechanics could boast about in the knowledge of assembling, maintaining and repairing car engines, not a single company has attempted to create its own internal combustion engine with the intent of mass production. The country was relegated to using surplus engines for jeepneys, as well as assembling completely knocked-down (CKD) body kits for various Japanese and American car manufacturers (and even one type of Armored Personnel Carrier for the Philippine Army). Never was the country able to completely manufacture of any mass-produced automobile from top to bottom.

Due to higher-quality offerings of truck-cabbed alternatives with passenger modules in the rear, the jeepney is now dying a slow death. While they are still “King of the Road” in Manila, low sales and profitability has killed all but the most persistent jeepney assemblers of Cavite. Their demise, however, is more pronounced in Cebu, where Chinese manufactured “multicabs” and truck-cabbed jeepneys with Isuzu Elf and Toyota Hi-Ace engines, chassis and driver modules now rule.

An industrial pariah

This situation isn’t even isolated to the automotive industry: while the Philippines has been home to several multinational companies, none of these had resulted in the creation of large local counterpart enterprises. The Philippines hosted Intel since the 1970s, but has yet to have any local company that manufactures PC components (S3 Graphics, while founded by Filipinos Dado Banatao and Robert Yara, was established in Silicon Valley). This is in stark contrast with Taiwan, which is home to computing giants Acer and Asus, among others. Texas Instruments has long had its electronics plant in Baguio, yet no local electronics company has become prominent. American Power Supplies and International Business Machines has been in the country longer than Intel has. The list goes on and on.

It is obvious that, despite the brain drain brought about by the labor export industry, the country does not lack, or at least at several points in its history, has never lacked the means to produce technical expertise that industrialization requires. Neither is there a lack in investment and funding, as evidenced by the continued presence of big-name corporations in the country, notwithstanding moves to shift factories to China. Further evidence of the above is the continued establishment of business process outsourcing firms in the country, which implies both investment and skill.

The government is not entirely remiss in its support to local industry either. Just last month the Department of Science and Technology launched the One-Stop Information Shop of Technologies (OSIST) website (http://www.osist.dost.gov.ph) to assist technology experts and inventors in finding venture capitalists and buyers. While several online pundits question the PHP20 million funding of what essentially is a turtle-paced-loading website, the project will hopefully take off and become a useful tool in aiding inventors like Mr. Caroro in fielding tech innovations like his G-Car. It has to be noted, however that this is not the first time the DOST attempted to set up a program that it hoped would help local industries take off.

Asia’s uncommon manufacturing industry roots

Asia has, arguably, three main manufacturing powerhouses: Japan, China and South Korea, but they each have unique histories in terms of the growth of their manufacturing sectors.

Japan embarked on a sizable Meiji Emperor-sanctioned industrialization effort during the late 19^th century, and while for most of mid-20^th century they had the reputation of producing cheap imitations, relentless improvements in process and technology eventually allowed them to come up with advances above and beyond their Western counterparts.

China, meanwhile, isolated for much of the half-century after the Second World War, had to rely on reverse-engineering much of Western technology, as well as technology-sharing with the USSR, and thus almost forcefully expanded its local manufacturing capability, even before its shift to the capitalist market model.

South Korea, on the other hand, was a little bit more orchestrated, with the regime of Park Chung-hee implementing continuous 5-year development periods during the 1960s that nursed and encouraged industrialization, in a rapid expansion that was eventually termed as the “Miracle on the Han River”.

During the 1950s and 60s the Philippines enjoyed a vibrant economy and an apparently advanced manufacturing sector. The sense of security this brought, however, was false: the industries that the Philippines relied on were primarily American and non-indigenous; and whatever prosperity Filipinos enjoyed rested on the mistaken belief that these foreign investments will remain on the country indefinitely. By the time the problems brought about by the Marcos dictatorship manifested itself in economic collapse, the happy-go-lucky era of American-funded industrialization was already on the way out.

An unwanted local manufacturing industry

The local market was, itself, a challenge. While the Chinese had no choice but to use whatever products are allowed by the Communist government, and the Japanese and Korean markets are fiercely nationalistic in patronizing their own products, moneyed Filipinos were obsessing themselves with everything “state-side”. Everything imported from the US was a godsend; anything local was cheap and “bakya” (out-of-fashion).

Whatever local manufacturing industry offering there was on its own, save for those that were American-branded (e.g., Concepcion Industries’ locally manufactured Carrier air conditioners). Probably the only thriving local manufacturing industry was involved in textiles, clothing, or jeepney manufacture: the latter was even threatened to be usurped by the introduction of Asian Utility Vehicles like Ford’s Fierra and Toyota’s Tamaraw.

What eventually killed the jeep industry, however, were steady albeit imperfect improvements in the local transport systems, as well as increased spending power that weaned private vehicle owners to vans and cars and away from locally crafted jeepneys and owner-type jeeps. It did not help that the local market did not have a genuine automobile product to respond to the demand.

Questions in catching up with a global economy

It is not difficult to surmise that it is now nearly impossible to catch up to the manufacturing behemoth called China. It’s hard to compete with the business viability of going Chinese: cheap labor, power, and highly developed infrastructure trumps any sort of nationalist lament; it simply dictates against the principles of profitability and sustainability. It would be rather ironic to even note that Caroro and his G-Car might turn out to be better cheaply manufactured abroad than made in the country. It should be noted that the e-jeepneys in Makati, Bacolod and Cebu are all made in China.

However, the ill-effects of the Philippine labor-export industry tend to undermine whatever benefits, both real and unrealized, that the said industry has. Large populations of disunited families will be more damaging in the long-run, and skilled overseas labor has brought neither expertise nor industry that the country could positively exploit. The questions now arise: should the Philippines try, daunting as it may seem, to catch up with the Asian manufacturing giants? Should it refocus on other sectors, particularly in services (perhaps, business process outsourcing), which might have been effective for some economies (Hong Kong comes into mind)?

Will Filipino industrialization remain as an electric dream?

Asian Spirit has since been renamed Zest Airways, or simply, ZestAir, complete with a new orange and green livery:

Photo by Xu Zheng, taken from airliners.net. Click on the pic to enlarge.

“Asia’s most refreshing airline” has been continuing the major refleeting effort started before Yao’s acquisition of the airline, with new Xian MA-60 turboprops replacing most of its old aircraft. ZestAir is retaining its De Havilland Dash-7 aircraft however.

An interesting note is that the ZestAir website fleet homepage now officially publicizes their intent to acquire at least one (apparently, up to four) 220-seater Airbus A320. Once this jet is delivered, ZestAir will be at par with big players Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific, and would leave behind Southeast Asian Airlines as the only major Filipino carrier without a wide-bodied aircraft.

Furthermore, the arrival of yet another Airbus-powered airline might spur a new round of price-wars amongst the local carriers. If that happens, it will be good for all Philippine travellers — hopefully it won’t be at the expense of good service, though!

CEB was also ranked by the magazine as No. 23 in the world and No. 5 in Asia in total passengers carried in 2007.

CEB carried a total of almost 5.5 million passengers in 2007, up 57.4 per cent from 2006. [Yahoo! Finance]

This is one of the reasons why Cebu Pacific has been gung-ho in expanding their operations, including a change in their online reservation system which led to quite a fuss in this blog a few months ago.

Kudos to them, although I hope we get less complaints about their services instead of more. Growth at the expense of customer service is the worst marketing tactic anybody can ever use.

Hat tip to Technogra.ph for this story.

One of the main points of criticism against my rather controversial, death-threat worthy posts regarding Cebu Pacific’s dismal service and the involvement of software development company Navitaire was that they found my posts too negativist and tried to bully me into suggested that I criticize more constructively.

In that case, I do hope Navitaire employees, both former and current, do open their minds and keep themselves from wanting to kill me while I attempt to provide some unsolicited advice, which I hope moves towards a more “positive” and “constructive” analysis of the system at hand.

First I want to acknowledge that some of the errors, particularly, some stray footers, have been fixed and have ceased to be an unsightly annoyance, and let it be known that the fact that errors are being mitigated is something deeply appreciated.

(Continue reading Unsolicited advice for improving Cebu Pacific’s Sky Sales sytem)

I gave thought to this after reading Aileen’s post on how she lost money because of Cebu Pacific:

I booked 4 members of my family for a trip to Jakarta. Because of the new policies of DSWD and the long time it takes to get documents from NSO I was not able to obtain a travel clearance for my son despite all the efforts I put in it. In short, I had to cancel his ticket.

Unfortunately the time I had to cancel the ticket was the time that Cebu Pacific decided to upgrade (a.k.a. mess up) their system and my calls and emails were left unanswered. I was also advised that it would take more than half a day if I went to their office as it was jampacked like a rock concert. I cannot stand crowds and hey I’m a very busy person, I cannot take half a day out just to cancel a ticket. Besides what are customer hotlines and emails for if you cannot call and seek assistance through these channels?[An Apple A Day]

While the failure coincided with the transition to the new system, I might have been a little harsh on Navitaire, as it appears that some other changes were taking place which caused the swamping of Cebu Pacific ticketing offices at the time. This was confirmed by an email sent to I-NAV Travel & Tours:

17 MARCH 2008

TO : ALL SUB – AGENTS

FROM : [omitted]

SUBJECT : MANUAL TICKETS

Please be informed, effective 01 April 2008, the new system, New Skies by Navitaire will no longer accept manual tickets and these will be purged from the Cebu Pacific system. All unused manual tickets shall be surrendered to Supersonic Services Inc., and all issuance beyond 01 April 2008 shall be considered as unauthorized and the corresponding penalties shall be imposed on violators.

Please be advised, likewise, Cebu Pacific will be pulling out from the BSP and IATA agents will be no longer be able to issue BSP tickets.

Agents that do not have the new system, Navitaire, installed in their offices, may continue to transact business for Domestic and International tickets thru Supersonic Services Inc.

Clearly, not only was there a software change, but a simultaneous process change scheduled for April 1, 2008.

Around March 30, Cebu Pacific issued an advisory in their website that their online booking system would be taken down until noon of April 1.

What happened on April 1 was telling, as experienced by Melynn and her partner travel agencies. Nobody was answering the phones at Cebu Pacific. This was particularly disastrous because travel agencies which were not connected to Cebu Pacific’s system either had to use the call centers or the ticketing offices. Everyone, including online customers, were also supposed to use the call centers to rebook and cancel flights, or request for refunds (like Aileen did).

Since nobody could call, everyone showed up in the ticketing offices. Disaster struck, and it appears that it has not yet shown signs of abating.

I still stand by my observation that the confusing way by which SkySales handles credit card payments is a major flaw that has to be changed, or at least made more clear. However, I now believe that SkySales or New Skies is not the weakest link in this Cebu Pacific saga.

The weakest link was the sudden, eerie crash of Cebu Pacific’s call center services.

As of writing it still takes an average of 45 minutes wait before a human would answer your call to Cebu Pacific. The problem is exacerbated by the confusion caused by the disambiguation of reservation and payment, with people wanting to know why their payments are still pending after a few days, or why existing confirmed and paid reservations appearing and disappearing from the system intermittently, or wanting to cancel their transactions completely.

We could only speculate as to what really is happening in Cebu Pacific, but right now the following mistakes are clear:

• A change of software was made simultaneous to a change in workflow/processes. This is almost inevitable, but can usually be compensated with vigilant customer support
• Call center services were taken down/became inefficient just when they were needed most
• Customer service emails were also being ignored (as per Aileen)
• No additional personnel have been delegated to ticketing offices despite weeks of backlogs and being swamped by customers
• Perhaps mitigation steps have been taken but seriously, none of them are working

It is an understatement to say that Cebu Pacific has some people problems in its organization, especially in terms of handling its customers and customer feedback systems, namely, the call centers and emails. I really hope Cebu Pacific would be able to resolve all these problems, and that Navitaire can help them expedite the resolution of any technical issues they still have.

So my previous statement still stands: avoid Cebu Pacific for now. We’re gonna tell you when Cebu Pacific’s human agents are able to answer promptly again.

Melynn, who operates I-NAV Travel & Tours, got pissed yesterday. She arrived at the Cebu Pacific ticketing office at 10 in the morning. By the time she was done, it was already 3 in the afternoon. The office was simply overwhelmingly jampacked.

Nope, there was no Piso Fare promo going on. Everyone was doing their transactions manually because Cebu Pacific just changed their perfectly fine online reservation system with a massively confusing online facility made by Navitaire.

I don’t know precisely why Cebu Pacific replaced their previous online system. It was working fine last time. But a few weeks ago they changed it and it is now what it is.

At first the bugs seem to be really simple, and as a web developer myself I understand how bugs such as this could happen:

That’s a screen shot of the online reservation system jumbling its div tags in Internet Explorer 7.0.

And the online reservation system absolutely doesn’t work in Firefox 2.0. Or at least doesn’t go beyond the flight search page. Which renders it useless for FF users. I wonder how it is in Safari.

However, the above are simple bugs really. It’s easy (at least for me) to excuse these kinds of errors.

But along the way they also changed things that shouldn’t be changed. A guy named Phen commented this on a previous thread about Cebu Pacific’s service:

I used to fly Cebu Pacific for my personal trips, the reason being cheap. However with what happened to me last April 4, 2008 for my Davao-Cebu flight, I will never be on this carriage again. I was supposed to fly to Cebu at 6.30 am, I was there at Davao airport 5am. Upon checking in, I was told that I couldn’t take the flight because my ticket wasn’t confirmed! I purchased it online with confirmed status clearly indicated in my print-out. The not-so-customer-oriented staff pointed out that the status for payment was pending, which was written at the bottom part of the ticket. Who on earth would think that you were not able to pay when you got a confirmation?! And worst, nobody from Cebu Pacific thought of calling me to let me know. I was denied right on the spot, and when I asked for their assistance to at least get me in, the lady in the check in counter just instructed me to go to the ticketing office.

Here comes the worst part, no one from the ticketing office had the consideration to prioritize me or give me a confirmed reservation for the next flight at the least. The ticketing staff, Mr. Jonathan Leonor, just told me to wait so that they could check. I was waiting already for an hour, and got the same response when I asked for a reservation. He had even the gut to go out for a cigarette break, what kind of staff are these? [Is Cebu Pacific hoodwinking its passengers into empty flights?]

I verified the above with my wife, and she said it was true. Their e-tickets now have two statuses that you have to check: reserved and paid, and instantly confusion is introduced into the system. Let me illustrate:

• Reservation is pending and payment is pending. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is confirmed and payment is pending. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is pending and payment is confirmed. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is confirmed and payment is confirmed. Can you board the plane? Yes.

There is exactly one and only one set of conditions where you can board the plane, and that is when both reservation and payment are confirmed. Why did they have to break the two down and confuse the passengers? This disambiguation which instead of making things clear has led to utter confusion is an act of monumental stupidity on the part of both Cebu Pacific and the software developer Navitaire.

Passengers do not care if either their reservation or their payment is confirmed or not. Passengers only care if they can board the plane or not. This is the question that needs to be answered, and clearly Cebu Pacific does not answer this question clearly in their system, and the result is pissed, inconvenienced passengers who have suffer the hassle of being turned back and made to cancel their travel plans because Cebu Pacific did not make things clear to them.

Yes it sounds cliche, but I really have to say it here: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Cebu Pacific should not have changed their previous online system. Or at least Navitaire should’ve entered a more intensive QA phase wherein they hallway-tested the results of their system where it would be revealed that their e-tickets are absolutely confusing.

So for the record: Avoid Cebu Pacific at all costs. At least for the next few months — until they fix their system, or bring the old one back.