Great news for us down South!

Cebu Pacific, the leading domestic airline in the Philippines, has inaugurated its operations hub in Davao City last 8 May 2008, to further serve the island of Mindanao. Hopefully this will mean more air routes to the “missionary” destinations on the island. This is the carrier’s third hub, after Cebu and Manila.

The new hub now services 4 domestic destinations from Davao: Manila, Cebu, Iloilo and Zamboanga; as well as 2 international destinations: Hong Kong and Singapore. Cebu Pacific is currently the only Filipino airline offering flights from Davao to Singapore. The other airline servicing this route is Singapore Airlines’ regional carrier, Silk Air.

We are making Davao our third hub in order to make the city and the rest of Mindanao more accessible for tourism and trade. We understand the need to offer a more convenient and affordable service out of Davao and hope that the public will take advantage of these new services.
- Candice Iyog, VP for Marketing and Product

And take advantage we will! Travel and tourism have been transformed into what they are today, thanks to Cebu Pacific’s revolutionary Go Fares. In 2007, the airline provided air transport to 5.5 million passengers. This year, it is expected to exceed 7 million passengers.

To give you an idea, the lowest one-way year-round Go Fare for a flight from Davao to Iloilo is P288 (exclusive of the ridiculously high tax imposed by the government). This is, of course, apart from the famed Piso Fare that passengers can catch from time to time when booking online.

Speaking of which, it was Cebu Pacific that popularized the use of Web-based personal ticketing among Filipinos. It would seem that the one function that used to be exclusive to travel agencies, issuing tickets to passengers, is now becoming a thing of the past.

The airline has a spread of 21 domestic flights from its 3 hubs, and flies to 14 international destinations. Pretty soon, Cebu Pacific will start flying to 2 more: Kaohsiung in Taiwan and Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia.

Kudos to one of Asia’s youngest fleets!