Piso Fare Increase? The Before and After Comparison

Image via Wikipedia

As many of you might have already noticed, Cebu Pacific has changed their trademark promo PISO FARE recently in terms of pricing. Last year, I remember booking a round trip 'piso fare' ticket for my two friends coming from Manila to Cebu. The price was totally awesome, 195 pesos only for (no-baggage).

And just recently, Cebu Pacific announces another edition of piso fare promo. This time however, I was a little surprised to find out that the total fare for a two-person (Cebu to Davao) , no baggage, piso fare ticket was amounting to 1228 Pesos. This was a stunning 530% increase! What happened?

Well I did a simple investigation. I compared the price breakdown of my previous bookings and compared it to the one I recently done. Here's what I found out.

Facts:
Cebu Pacific breaks the price of your ticket with these categories:

Base Fare
Taxes & Fees
Web Admin Fee
Web Admin Fee (PC)
Travel Insurance
Excess Baggage
Sports Equipment
WWF Donation
Seat Reservation
Go Lite Discount
Unaccompanied Minor

Here's the comparison of how they priced those categories before and after.

Click to ENLARGE the image.

Notes: I ignored the base fare comparison because in the previous (before) breakdown calculation, the baggage is included in it.

Findings
In the image above, you can obviously see what was the culprit in the fare increase. It was none other than taxes and fees. We don't currently know how much the taxes were and how much the fees were but that specific category increased by almost 1000% after the recent change.

Conclusion
As you can see, Cebu Pacific increased the over-all price of their promo fares, and most obviously, the popular piso fare. But does it mean that I don't like Cebu Pacific anymore? No, of course not. I still love Cebu Pacific promos and although the Piso Fare and their other promos have already increased in prices, they still offer considerable discount especially for frequent travelers like me.

One more thing is, do we have other options? Yes, Airphil Express has just recently entered (on the fullest sense) the low-cost airline market and their promos are extremely attractive. But overall, Cebu Pacific still is the king of promo fares.

So why wrote this article? Simple. To inform you, my readers, regarding changes that might be interesting to you. So next time you see a promo from Cebu Pacific, do a trial booking first before you finally pay.

Airphil Express is the Most Sociable Airline - Planely

Image via CrunchBase

Remember the contest launched by Planely.com last April 2011? Yes, Planely goes out to determine who is the most sociable airline in the world. The goal is simple, to find out which airline has the most number of passengers who wants to share their flight information. In turn Planely will find a match for your profile. This can lead to having a new friend or a potential business partner.

Well, last month's competition was already done. At the conclusion of the contest, our very own Cebu Pacific was crowned as the most sociable airline in the world. The victory was almost landslide, with Cebu Pacific registering a score of 913 and at the far second place was Norwegian Air Shuttle with 351. Other airlines in the Philippines was also included in the list with Airphil Express was at No.7, Philippine Airlines (PAL) at No.11 and Zest Airways at No.17.

But wait! After a month after the competition was concluded, Planely redefined their scorecards. The reason is that, they realized (quite late) that they are not being fair to the airlines in the contest. What they did is that they compared each airline equally. Of course, those with larger volume of passengers already have the edge. With that, they revised their scoring to account for the size of the airline company (based on 2010 flight volume data). With this new weighted scoring, the ranks were reshuffled.

And guess who's the new title holder now? It's Airphil Express! Airphil Express toppled Cebu Pacific to snatch the crown as the most sociable airline in the world! Cebu Pacific landed on second place and followed by Zest Airways! Three Philippine airlines on top! This is another proof the Filipinos were generally sociable people!

Blogger is Now Up and Running After A Massive Outage

Cross posted from Technology Logs.

Yes, Google's Blogger.com is now up and running! This is actually my first post after the almost-three-day downtime of the popular blogging service.

The outage came after Blogger's scheduled maintenance last Thursday (PHT). The maintenance was supposed to to last for only one-hour but after it, Blogger came back to read-only-mode wherle users can't upload new contents to their blogs. They also removed all articles and comments posted during the short uptime after the maintenance.

Although Blogger said that they already started restoring those articles, my posted articles are yet to be restored until the time of writing.