Cebu Pacific sees 17% rise in passengers

Budget carrier Cebu Pacific expects to increase its passengers by nearly a fifth this year as it adds new routes, including the first scheduled commercial flights at Kalibo, Aklan, one of the country’s gateways to Boracay.

The airline on Thursday revealed that it missed its full-year target of flying 12 million passengers in 2011 by a hair. The company said its final passenger tally reached 11.94 million passengers.

Despite this, the company remained confident of its prospects, saying that for 2012, it expected to have 14 million passengers, or 17 percent higher than last year’s count.

“Cebu Pacific will continue to boost tourism and trade in destinations we fly to, and offer the most innovative travel services for the convenience of our guests,” Cebu Pacific vice president for marketing and distribution Candice Iyog said.

She said the airline took delivery of five brand-new Airbus A320 jets last year, resulting in an increase in seat capacity by 13 percent. This and the improvement in average load factors—indicating that more seats were filled on each flight—helped Cebu Pacific post healthy passenger growth rates.

On the domestic side of its operations, Cebu Pacific said it flew 9.22 million passengers, up by 12 percent from the year before. More impressive was the company’s international tally, which reached 2.72 million in 2011—up 22 percent year on year.

In the coming months, Iyog said the company planned to launch its first international flights to and from Boracay with the introduction of direct flights to Hong Kong from Kalibo, Aklan. The new route would be launched by the third week of March, the airline said.

Other new routes include Cebu Pacific’s first flights between Manila and the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, and the resumption of flights between Manila and Xiamen.