My personal complaint about CebuPac is their new "no refunds" policy that started last December 2009. If you have to cancel a flight, even if it's way before the 24-hr limit for avoiding the "no-show" charge, you still get fined P2,500 per way (so 5k for round trips). My beef is this: a family emergency forced me to postpone indefinitely what should've been a vacation in Japan. Not having any definite ideas on when I might fly again, I chose to cancel the ticket merely a day after it was bought. My flight was still 3 weeks away, so I figured I'd rather shoulder the P5,000 cancellation penalty rather than risk it being forfeited in case I still could not fly within the ticket's validity period (for rebookings). What a nasty surprise I got when CebuPac officials flatly refused to refund my money. What they do now for cancelled tickets, they said, is put the money (net of the penalty) into a "Travel Fund," from which I could deduct future tickets. To aggravate matters further, the travel fund was only good for 90 days, after which any money left within would be totally forfeited. Darned and double darned! What about people like me who aren't frequent fliers, and who definitely cannot fly within the stated 90-day limit (because of our family emergency)? Does that mean I have to resign myself to the very real possibility that my P22,000+ ticket would just sink down the drain just like that? Talk about highway robbery! It seems CebuPac is one of those companies where, once money gets in, it won't be allowed to find its way out, however legit the reasons. Because of this, I've resolved NEVER to fly Cebu Pac ever again. I've heard of horror stories of being bumped off flights because of overbooking, of flights being cancelled without prior warning because not enough people had bought into the cancelled flight (and therefore CebuPac was squeezing everyone into the next flight to save on fuel). To this day, they're very well-known for enticing the public with ultra-cheap plane seats, only to tell customers those flights have been bought up once they call in to buy them. This tactic is called bait-and-switch: advertise a dirt-cheap product, then claim it's been sold out when the customer comes in, so that you could offer a slightly more expensive product that has the price you really wanted to sell at. Years ago, I was willing to give CebuPac the benefit of the doubt because an expanding company will have growing pains. But no. CebuPac isn't a fledgling airline anymore. It's been around for more than a decade. Yet its facilities and the quality of service personnel remain below par. No more Mr. Nice Guy from me anymore. Enough cutting them some slack. Mr. John Gokongf#&kingwei, your companies are very well-known for less-than-honest tactics. Go! Hotels is like this. So is Sun Cellular. You just lost one customer here. And I hope more follow after they see through your abominable airline.
