PAL opposes UAE plea for more daily flights to PH

FLAG carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) again urged the government to deny the United Arab Emirates additional flight entitlements in this week’s bilateral air talks, saying this will hurt its business, a statement over the weekend showed.

The air talks have been set for Aug. 27-28, 2015, with the aim of negotiating a possible increase in flight frequencies.

Emirates, which currently flies twice per day between Manila and Dubai, wants a third daily flight.

But PAL said current frequencies were sufficient to serve existing demand and alleged that gulf carriers, which are state-owned and receive billions of dollars in subsidies, have an unfair advantage.

Dubai-based flag carrier Emirates, however, denies this claim.

“Should the UAE airlines get the additional entitlements they seek during the coming Philippine-UAE air talks, this will undermine the investments PAL and other airlines have made for the country in opening new routes to serve Philippine tourism and overseas Filipino workers,” PAL president Jaime Bautista said in the statement.

PAL suggested in the statement that gulf carriers, because of their financial backing, can offer cheaper tickets and “siphon passenger traffic via their hubs” in the gulf region to other destinations beyond the UAE such as Europe and the United States.

This puts PAL’s business at risk, given that it only recently expanded anew in the United States and restarted its operations in Europe via flights to London

“PAL is always ready to compete energetically on a level playing field. In fact, PAL has been successful in operating at high frequency levels on many hotly contested routes between the Philippines and the USA, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Korea,” PAL said.

“The Middle East and Europe routes are, however, unique because the competitive field is distorted by the massive subsidies enjoyed by gulf carriers,” it added.

The current valid bilateral air pact with UAE already allows its carriers a maximum of 28 weekly flights to Manila and unlimited flights to Clark, Cebu and other airports in the Philippines.