HOT NEWS:
We have been caught by surprise with hundreds of emails angrily complaining about Cebu Pacific's blatant disinterest in customers' wellbeing and satisfaction after receiving their booking payments. We will examine every complaint to determine whether a class action lawsuit would be feasible. Please bear with us while we work on it, and you can still make your own individual complaints to Cebu Pacific in the meantime.
CEBU PACIFIC CORPORATE
CORRUPTION SCANDAL
CUSTOMERS' LOSSES DIRECTLY CAUSED BY CEBU PACIFIC
ARE ONLY A GAME TO CEO GOKONGWEI
IF YOU SEARCH THE INTERNET FOR CEBU PACIFIC CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS, you'll find an endless list of customers' bad experiences with Cebu Pacific going back several years and all followed by the company's infamous evasion of any responsibility when its own employees or its outsourced agents make appalling errors that cause passengers exhausting delays, financial ruin, physical and emotional distress, and even injury and loss of life.
The company recently announced an order for bigger aircraft, and its President and CEO Lance Gokongwei said: "The A320 (Airbus) has played a key role in enabling us to build an efficient, profitable, value-based business. The 220-seater A321neo will be a game changer for Cebu Pacific. We will be able to serve cities in Australia, India and northern Japan."
His business is certainly profitable, but it is neither efficient nor value-based, and evidently what Gokongwei really meant was that Cebu Pacific will be able to rip-off passengers to and from Australia, India and northern Japan as well as all those it regularly rips off now.
Whilst President Aquino makes superhuman efforts to eradicate political corruption, Cebu Pacific is increasing its corporate corruption by leaps and bounds. If you have not yet been ripped off by Cebu Pacific, take the time to browse the internet and read some of the stories yourself. Here are just a few that customers describe, and browsing the internet will give you many more:
1) The advertised promo price is not the actual cost, which is a lot more when they've added taxes and various fees and other charges of their own.
2) If you have any query after your booking is confirmed, the "hotlines" given on the Cebu Pacific website and e-ticket are to an outsourced call center, not to the company itself. What does this mean? It means that you can't contact Cebu Pacific. Also it possibly means you can't contact the call center either because its lines are so busy. You must be prepared to keep trying for hours or even days to get through. When you do, the call will probably take a long time (at your expense). The call center staff may be trained to be friendly and polite, but they can't answer your questions. They take notes which are passed to a supervisor who decides how to handle them. If you're lucky, someone will call you back with an answer, but there's no guarantee it will be correct. And if your query was urgent, forget it, because you'll still have no way to contact Cebu Pacific yourself.
3) If you booked a hotel through Cebu Pacific, transportation from and to the airport is not included. This may seem to be a relatively minor omission, but it isn't if you arrive in the early hours of the morning in a city you're not familiar with and where you don't speak the language. Passengers have been forced to stay the (hotel already paid for) first night at the airport, because they were unable to find a bus or taxi to take them to their hotel. Others have taken taxis, only to be charged more than the cost of the night at their hotel.
4) If you have a query or problem of any kind for Cebu Pacific after arrival in your destination country, you will need to use the same Manila or Cebu "hotlines" that you must use in the Philippines. Exactly the same situation applies as in item 2) above, except that you're now calling at your own expense from overseas. So if your problem is urgent and even if it's life threatening - guess what? - you've no hope whatever of getting an urgent answer from Cebu Pacific.
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5) You may now be thinking: "What about Cebu Pacific's publicized presence in all those different countries? Whatever their destination city, why can't customers just go to the local Cebu Pacific office?" Because their "presence" is also outsourced, this time to local sales agents, just as the Cebu Pacific "checkin" at foreign airports is outsourced to ground handling agents. This makes them worse than the "hotlines". Employees of the agents will not even take notes and pass them on. They merely tell you to contact Cebu Pacific, which you already know is impossible.
6) You may also be thinking: "At least Cebu Pacific does offer cheap promos, and if this is how they cut costs then all the other low-cost airlines must do the same." This is not so. You'd get the best customer service and after-sales support from IATA travel agents in conjunction with quality hotels and major airlines that have international reputations to maintain, and clearly this would cost you more. But some of the budget airlines have very good customer support, and it pays to shop around. Airphil Express for example, has 24/7 customer support on Facebook easily accessible in all its destination countries. If Airphil Express can do it, why can't Cebu Pacific?
7) You've got it in one! Cebu Pacific does not want to provide after-sales customer support. Once they've got your money, they don't give a damn about you. However disastrous the mistakes made by Cebu Pacific employees or outsourced agents, and however disastrous the customers' consequent experiences of a trip with Cebu Pacific, the company management does not want to receive any complaints and will not authorize any refunds. That's how they make their profits.
8) So now you may think: "But if there are so many dissatisfied customers, surely this would deter other people from flying with Cebu Pacific?"
9) It isn't that simple. Cebu Pacific's business model is based on percentages. For example if 50 percent of their flights are more or less on time, the customers will tolerate minor delays and irritations as the acceptable price in actual experience of low-cost in money. Then if a further 25% of their flights have longer delays and give passengers other problems, some customers will still shrug it off as the additional price they need to pay in non-money terms for a trip that's low-cost in money, while other passengers will get angry and attempt to lodge complaints but - albeit reluctantly - give it up as a waste of time when they find out how long it takes to get through to a "hotline" call center and how impossible it is to contact Cebu Pacific. If the remaining 25 percent of flights are so apallingly bad for whatever reason and cause the passengers very serious problems, the customers will persist much longer in trying to register complaints through the call centers and in any other way they can but ultimately, after months of trying, they will reach the point of knowing that the only way to resolve their issues would be legal action which would cost them more time, more money, more heartache, and what hope would they have in a court battle against a big corporation with unlimited resources? In the end they give up too, and Cebu Pacific wins all 100 percent without a fight simply by outsourcing everything they can, offering low promo prices and providing no customer support even when things go very seriously wrong. This is why CEO Lance Gokongwei calls it a "profitable game", treating customers like disposable chess pawns that can be sacrificed at any time to achieve his checkmate end-game. But for all the passengers he sacrifices who suffer from disastrous Cebu Pacific trips it's not a game at all; it's a tragedy with knock-on effects and ramifications that can last months or even years.
10) "Is there anything else they can do to get help?" Yes. As individuals they don't stand a chance. Collectively it would be a different story. This requires a "class action", whereby individual claims - for which it would be uneconomic to seek litigation separately - are aggregated into a bigger collective lawsuit. It would need a large number of dissatified customers with genuine claims. It would need an incorruptible attorney to act for them, and an incorruptible judge to hear and settle the case. The whole thing would need to be done openly, transparently, systematically and lawfully. This is how a dictionary definition describes it: "A class action is an effective means for holding defendants accountable for widespread harm that would otherwise go unchecked."
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BEWARE!!! BEWARE!!! BEWARE!!!
"FUN TOUR" PROMOS
OF CEBU PACIFIC AIR
CEBU PACIFIC'S ONLINE CHEAP FLIGHT PROMOS ARE GENERALLY FINE BUT IF YOU BOOK A "FUN TOUR" PACKAGE TO INCLUDE A HOTEL STAY, YOUR TRIP CAN BECOME A NIGHTMARE.
Some friends of mine booked a 5 day 4 night "Fun Tour" with Cebu Pacific and paid in full online 3 months in advance including the 4 night stay at a hotel chosen from the recommended list on the Cebu Pacific website.
Before their trip, on searching for the hotel's website to print out a location map, they discovered to their astonishment that the hotel had closed down almost 2 weeks previously, yet no word of this had been communicated to them by Cebu Pacific.
Then came the serious problem with CP's online bookings: contacting anyone about them is almost impossible. Their website gives no email address. Just "Hotline" telephone numbers in Manila and Cebu that are permanently busy.
My friends spent nearly a whole day repeatedly dialling before at last getting through. But these "Hotlines" are not to Cebu Pacific. They are to a Call Center with the function of filtering, taking notes, and passing queries to a supervisor who decides whether or not to pass them on to Cebu Pacific. It's a slow, laborious, frustrating, inconvenient, costly (you're paying for phone call) process.
In this case my friends' message was considered serious enough to pass on, and some hours later they received a call from Cebu Pacific saying they had contacted the destination hotel which informed them it had only been closed for a single day and there was no problem with it.
My friends questioned this because it contradicted the notice on the hotel's own official website, and were asked to hold while Cebu Pacific double-checked. The caller, who gave no name or direct line for future contact, returned to say the hotel had confirmed it was open and there would be no problem. "Just go there." So they did.
"Fun Tour" was Nightmare Trip for vacationers who booked Cebu Pacific online promo.
Upon late night arrival at the destination airport and clearance through immigration and customs, they encountered another regular difficulty with "Fun Tour" promos. No transportation to hotel is included. After trying unsuccessfully to find a bus going in the right direction, they were finally forced to take a taxi, which cost them as much as a night at the hotel, which they reached at about 2am.
When they got there, the door was open but the reception desk was unattended. Calling out and knocking on the counter a few times eventually resulted in the appearance of someone clearly irritated at being disturbed. She looked at the reservation details on the Cebu Pacific e-ticket, brought a man out from inside and told my friends to follow him.
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The man, whose manner was equally disinterested and offhand, made no attempt to help carry their baggage and walked out of the hotel into the street, where it had started to rain. Carrying their own baggage and struggling to keep up, my friends followed him in the rain through narrow dimly lit streets, then up some stairs, through an empty building, down the stairs on the other side and further along another dark and wet street to end up at a different hotel.
This hotel was part of the same group of budget hotels, but it was not the one my friends had chosen and did not provide the same room facilities. The hotel receptionist was aggressively rude on being questioned about the one they had booked, confirming that it had permanently closed and adding that if my friends did not like this one they could get out and go somewhere else.
They pointed out that they had paid for 4 nights in advance, had already lost half of the first night, and asked if they could get their money back. The receptionist replied that they had paid the owner, not him, and there would be no refund if they did not stay there. He then demanded a substantial deposit for the room key, although no such deposit was mentioned on the Cebu Pacific website.
The Cebu Pacific e-ticket shows 4 nights' stay with checkout on Friday September 30.
By then it was too late and my friends were too tired to search for another hotel, and without refund they did not have enough spare cash to pay another hotel for the same 4 nights they had already paid Cebu Pacific for. Reluctantly they paid the room key deposit and stayed there 4 nights.
On the positive side, next morning their included American breakfast was fine, and the hotel's eatery staff were efficient and friendly. When they wandered out to walk around, they found that the location was in a tourist area largely frequented by backpackers so there was plenty of cheap transportation for sightseeing and a pickup point nearby for the airport shuttle bus.
However, my friends' "Fun Tour" package vacation nightmare was by no means over. The worst part was yet to come...
- Edu Garcia (Story of Cebu Pacific customers' ongoing nightmare to be continued.)
If you or someone you know had a genuine bad experience with Cebu Pacific, email the story to Cebu Pacific Complaints for posting with the above and others in a Cebu Pacific section that will be added on this website.
If you or someone you know had a genuine bad experience of a different corruption either political or corporate, email the story to our Webmaster who will create a new page or section for it.
LAST YEAR it was announced by Cebu Pacific's President and CEO Lance Gokongwei that the Philippines' biggest airline had just placed the "biggest aircraft order ever made by a Philippine carrier". Deliveries of 30 Airbus A321neos and 7 Airbus A320s will start in 2015, augmenting the 18 A320s already on order for delivery starting this year, and the company has an option for 10 more A321neos which can carry more people and fly further than the A320s. Mr. Gokongwei said: "The A320 Family has played a key role in enabling us to build an efficient, profitable, value-based business. The 220-seater A321neo will be a game changer for Cebu Pacific. We will be able to serve cities in Australia, India and northern Japan."
Airbus is itself an inspiring success story that began in 1967 when government ministers from Britain, France and Germany met in London to launch a European consortium for development of the A300 and compete with the Americans who then held more than 80 per cent of the world market. Today it's a large, complex, high-tech operation based at Toulouse, France, and it now consistently captures about half of all commercial airliner orders.
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