LOW-cost carrier Cebu Pacific (CEB) is working to restore all of the flights and possibly link the routes they fly to domestically.
"There will be less of new destinations, but more of connecting existing points together," CEB president and chief commercial officer Alexander Lao said during a press conference at the Ayala Museum in Makati City Wednesday, January 25.
Lao said they are currently taking advantage of reviving existing domestic routes since they are still transitioning towards normalizing their capacity following the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Because it allows us again to lower costs to lower fares," he added.
Although he said they are not closing doors for opening new routes in the future.
As for additional routes in Mindanao, he did not directly answer, but he said they are strengthening their existing routes to connect to other routes in the country.
“We resumed most routes connecting Davao and Zamboanga and so on and so forth;
points we used to fly are now flying again,” Lao said.
Meanwhile, Candice Iyog, CEB chief marketing and customer experience officer, said that it has restored 100 percent of its pre-pandemic capacity and the destinations it flies to.
“We are back. It is so good to be back... We have restored 34 of our 34 domestic flights and 25 of our 25 international flights,” Iyog said.
CEB said it will fully restore its flights to all its 25 international destinations in 14 countries by March 2023. The recovery will be aided by its seat sales, wide domestic network, and reinstatement of all its international destinations after te easing of travel requirements in most countries.
“International flights were harder to recover and it took us some time but now, we can see relaxing traveling requirements... We can say that we expect to see significant growth coming from our international network in 2023,” she said.
In 2022, CEB flew close to 15 million passengers compared to 3.3 million passengers in 2021. The year 2022, Iyog described, was the year the company “cautiously but at the same time optimistically rebuilt its network.”
“Our priority is to bring back all the flights we have suspended,” she said.
To address the surge in travel demand the Gokongwei-backed airline will receive 10 brand new planes in 2023 – three A320neo, three A321neo, and four A330neo. RGL