Cebu Pacific beefs up capacity in time for Christmas holidays

Budget carrier Cebu Pacific is gradually recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic as it boosted its capacity this month to serve passengers in time for the Christmas holidays and as more tourist destinations reopen for travel.

At a virtual briefing on Wednesday, Cebu Pacific vice president Candice Iyog said the airline increased its operating capacity to 16% of pre-COVID levels for December “as more domestic destinations reopened.”

Iyog said Cebu Pacific operated less than 10% of its pre-COVID network from June to November, when travel restrictions were eased all over the country.

She said the carrier now operates 400 to 450 flights weekly to 28 domestic and eight international destinations —Dubai, HongKong, Seoul, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, Singapore, and Taipei.

The Cebu Pacific official said increasing flights is part of the company’s plan to gradually recovery from the pandemic, in which the aviation and tourism sectors were badly hit from global flight cancellations and travel restrictions.

“We have to reforecast our projections, our recovery,” Iyog said.

“I think while everyone is really hoping for the vaccine, I think we cannot afford to wait for the vaccine to get here before we start to confidently fly again because of the impact of travel and tourism to the economy,” she added.

“So it’s really finding the right balance based on the information we have, based on the technology, based on what we have in place today so that we can already start calibrating,” she added.

In January to September, Cebu Pacific saw a net loss of P14.69 billion from a net income of P6.77 a year earlier as revenues plunged by 70% to P19.34 billion from P63.63 billion year-on-year.

To further boost the traveling public’s confidence in flying amid the pandemic, Cebu Pacific is adopting a three-step approach, namely sanitation, tracking and tracing, and testing. — RSJ, GMA News