Today
Monday, September 21, 1998
Cebu Pacific Air has strengthened its position as the second biggest domestic airline and even leads the field in some routes in terms of passenger and market share.
Diego Garrido, Cebu Air Senior Vice President said the two-year-old airline has made its mark by pioneering in low fares and posting the best on-time performance.
"We have made flying affordable to more people by passing on to them our lower costs of operations," he said. "We have created our own market base and even attracted a good number of flyers from other airlines."
Based on data from the Manila Domestic Airport and the Civil Aeronautics Board for August, the country's four major commercial airlines flew 331,656 passengers on eight major mutes in the Visayas and Mindanao while total capacity stood at 463,171 seats.
Cebu Pacific accounted for one-third of the passengers (114,991), a 31-percent jump from the August 1997 level, although its seat capacity rose 27 percent only.
Philippine Airlines (PAL) flew 160,997 passengers on a capacity of 210,392 seats. PAL had a market share of 48.5 percent; Cebu Pacific had 35 percent.
On the premier Manila-Cebu route, 117,531 passengers flew in August, of which almost 33,000 took Cebu Pacific on a capacity of 41,100 seats. It represented a plane load factor of 79 percent.
PAL flew twice as many passengers (66,479) and deployed even more seats (95,598) for a load factor of 70 percent.
Garrido said Cebu Pacific operates at optimum efficiency because it has the right number of employees and uses only one type of aircraft, which leads to lower operating and maintenance costs.
It has also jobbed out certain activities such as ground handling, which could be handled more efficiently by companies that are already in that business, he said.
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