SECURITY ISSUES, DOUBLE BOOKINGS AND CEBU PACIFIC AIRLINES
By a Victim of Predatory and Dangerous CP Airlines
Cebu Pacific’s online booking system is often operating internationally illegally and unsafe—as well as passenger-unfriendly.
“MOST OBVIOUSLY by ALLOWING DOUBLE BOOKING OF PASSENGERS WITH SAME NAME AND AGES–WITHOUT ANY initial online SECURITY CHECK is only one KEY EXAMPLE of INCOMPETENT SECURITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. Any disguised individual could occupy the second sets of seats.”–KAS
For example, this past Friday, I was “permitted” on-line with CEBU PACIFIC in a crisis this past Friday to “accidentally book myself and [pay for] two family members” 2 times on the same flight–using all the same names and credit card address.
http://www.cebupacificair.com/
NOTE: This occurred because the local airline I was in (in Taiwan), UNI Air, is also incompetent and failed to tell me that 3 planes were canceled on December 10—due to weather issues—from tiny Beigan Island to Taipei. This thus made it impossible at the last minute to make my December 11 (1:20am) flight to Taiwan.
http://www.wego.com/airlines/uni-airways-b7/economy/from/taipei-tpe
Next, when a few minutes later, I understood my error with CEBU’s illegally operating system (1. the online system, 2. its fax-address and 3. phone numbers in Taipei for Cebu Pacific) failed to respond to my request to not double book myself and two families–and NOT TO CHARGE MY FAMILY 10,000 PESOS twice for each December 11 booking, i.e. for 3 passengers.
CONTACT THE MANILA PHONE NUMBER, MR. STODA
After getting no help from the Taipei contact addresses for Cebu Pacific, we went to the airport. All the Cebu Pacific staff at the International Airport in Taiwan could do was to tell me to contact Cebu Pacific when I arrived to Manila.
Yesterday, I arrived in Manila with my wife and child.
NOW–TODAY—when I CONTACTED face-to-face CEBU OFFICIALS in Manila, they claimed that the company would REFUSE to refund my second or DOUBLE BOOKING of 3 passengers on December 11, 2010 from Taipei to Manila–stating the company “considered it solely the responsibility of the passengers involved when there is any online booking error.”
HOW CAN PASSENGER BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE IN A DOUBLE BOOKING?
I take a moment here to ask you travelers and readers, “How can the person doing the online booking be solely responsible when the airline’s online booking systems allows passengers to double book themselves? Internationally, this is dangerous for security reason. It is also not good for customer service and reputation of the company.
I couldn’t believe such an outrageous statement. I listed off the reasons and asked to speak to the manager. I was told to call the CEBU Pacific number—which wasn’t even answering calls at the time. I stood firm and demanded to get a real authority further up in the chain-of-command speak to me and reconsider refunding the inadvertent second booking.
HERE IS WHAT I SUMMARIZED CONCERNING ON-LINE SERVICES
First of all, I know that INTERNATIONAL SECURITY WORLDWIDE, such as the FFA, currently have protocols which include telling the airlines to question any double bookings of the same names, ages, etc. of passengers–without a thorough investigation in advance.
QUITE OBVIOUSLY, Cebu Pacific’s online security is incompetent and virtually illegal if I can quickly and accidentally book and pay for the same 3 passengers on the same flight using same names and ages. Further, the Taiwan offices of Cebu and Manila offices of Cebu also failed to respond to my requests for assistance then in a timely manner.
NOT ONLY is the security system in error at Cebu Pacific, the policy (as far as my double bookings and other bookings are concerned) is wrong and incompetent because in my 5 most bookings to and from Taiwan( to and from Manila) the system has only confirmed my flights one or two times properly via email—as its online service is supposed to do 100% of the time. In short, not only is the internet security more than quirky at Cebu, but the email system is inconsistent.
Third, in August 2010 I became a Cebu Pacific online member on their website. However, in 4 months I have not received via email or snail mail any confirmation of this or my membership number.
In short, Cebu Pacific and its online web service is behaving dangerously–and incompetently on behalf of international passengers flying to and from overseas.
It allows double bookings of the same names. It doesn’t answer telephone calls, emails, faxes, or civil face-to-face requests for help in places, like Taiwan and Manila.
It does not treat loyal customers–like me (and my family)–friendly–but rather ADVERSARILY. That is, any airline in its right mind with passengers having flown (with family) multiple stretches on the same flights needs to be treated with respect and not blamed for all foibles or idiosyncrasies of a bad online and communication system at Cebu Pacific.
Currently, Cebu Pacific SIMPLY preys upon its own internet incompetence’s–especially in the lace of internet booking security and double charges passengers unfairly.
In response to Cebu Pacific’s double booking and charging of my family–i.e. with no apparent hope of recuperating our unfair losses (even despite international booking security breaches), I have determined to FILE A COMPLAINT WITH INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AT AIRPORTS personnel in the region–including the USA Embassy’s regional security supervisors for the FFA etc.
Yours,
Kevin Stoda
Philippines, Taiwan, USA
Eslkevin's Blog 
Such a Bad Airline—Never Again? UNI Airlines
By Kevin Stoda in Manila—a Victim of UNI Airlines business practices
On Monday, I published an article on CEBU PACIFIC AIRLINES’ growing reputation as a dangerous and cruel airline partner in Southeast Asia.
Today, I want to follow up with a short writing on UNI Air, which I also mentioned in the article above. UNI Air is the only operator to and from the main island of Taiwan to the Matsu Islands where I live and work. UNI Air is joined together with EVA air the national carrier but they are operating to a great extant independently–and evidently UNI Air owners and operators have no desire to live up to the high standards of EVA.
UNI DOMINATES DOMESTIC MARKET OF TAIWAN
UNI “airline has had the largest market share in the domestic Taiwan market in recent years, and has expanded to include international flights.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni_Air
UNI Air “operates mainly to domestic destinations, but also operates scheduled international flights to Bangkok, Hanoi and Seoul from Kaohsiung and chartered flights to Bali and Jeju from Kaohsiung.” It also flies to China and Japan.
However, on my island of Matsu—namely the island known as Beigan–, UNI Air often cancels its last flight each day. There are three flights daily to Taipei from Beigan and much of the time the last flight is canceled ostensibly due to weather conditions. The abused locals on Beigan are aware of these foibles and the belief is widespride that UNI Air just likes to cancel under-booked flights.
This forces locals to go to the neighboring island of Nangan and catch flights on daily or weekly basis.
MURPHEY’S LAW AND UNI AIR
However, locals in Matsu had told me that because Friday nights are full on UNI Air from Beigan the last flight on Friday always goes—i.e. no matter what.
Well, to make a long story short, Murphey’s Law was in full-effect last Friday (December 10, 2010) and UNI Air canceled every single one of its three flights to Taipei from Beigan. UNI Air’s irresponsibly failed to contact many of its passengers all day long. My family was one of those un-contacted groups of passengers.
NOTE: Had UNI Air notified me and my family in a timely manner, we 3 Stodas could have taken a boat over to Nangan and taken one of 6 or more daily flights to Taiwan.
More disconcerting is the fact that UNI Air has offered no financial refunds nor vouchers for the nearly 10,000 Taiwan Dollars I lost out on that Friday night—when my family of 3 failed to make its connection on Cebu Pacific flights from Taiwan’s International Airport near Taipei to Manila.
Worse still, none of the staff at UNI Air in Beigan spoke passable English. Meanwhile, the most that a customer service manager in Taipei for the firm could do was to bow and apologize—no offer of compensation was apparently even thought about.
I will have to find a way to complain to some consumer agency in Taiwan about UNI Air behavior—if I can find someone who can speak English.
SABENA
Back in the 1980s, a German once joked to me that the one-time national airlines for Belgium, named SABENA, actually stood for “Such A Bad Airline—Never Again.”
Whereas SABENA no longer exists in Belgium due to international and regional competition, the domestic dominate UNI AIR continues to own most of Taiwans local markets—and UNI Air is demonstrating how monopolies in Confucian Economies do not always produce high quality service.
—
Posted By Kevin Anthony Stoda to The Teacher at 12/14/2010 11:17:00 AM
Was Cebu Pacific being Vindictive when it Refused my Wife a Flight to Taiwan on Wednesday Night?
By Kevin Stoda
On Monday night, I had written up the following article on Cebu Pacific’s anti-consumer and safety practices. The article’s name was “SECURITY ISSUES, DOUBLE BOOKINGS AND CEBU PACIFIC AIRLINES”.
Subsequently, I have experienced two more days of dealing with Cebu Pacific’s various staff members and have learned how flat the hierarchy seems to be at CP, Philippines’ largest domestic airline. Namely, there appears to be no one in charge at Cebu and when making decisions and requests, it may take pulling teeth for hours to even get referred to someone who has some working authority or autonomy to do anything beyond whatever the company’s inflexibly followed and guidelines are..
In a clear example of this customer’s weakness vs. a goliath of a regional airline, I was given only 55% credit for the flight I wrote about in the article, “SECURITY ISSUES, DOUBLE BOOKINGS AND CEBU PACIFIC AIRLINES”. However, the 55% of the fair that is refunded goes into an account that disappears after 90 days—i.e. if you lose it, you lose it.
http://www.cebupacificair.com/
WAS CEBU BEING VINDICTIVE?
Worse still, it appears that my raising a fuss about being mishandled in my internet blogs and in my 3 visits to the various Cebu Pacific Manila offices, led to my wife being prohibited to join me on my flight from Manila to Taipei—our return flight after my wife had to go to Manila this week and do a visa interview at the USA Embassy.
While other reasons were given for not allowing my wife to take her seat on that Cebu Pacific flight, I was certainly taken aback by the airline’s taking on the negative role and blind bureaucratic tone that they did—almost all behaved like they lived in an only doing my job Nazi-follower mentality..
Finally, the Cebu staff even stated unequivocally that my wife would NOT BE REFUNDED THE COST OF THE TICKET.
see this video on firms like Cebu
I have taken 30 flights with Cebu Pacific so far, no problems at all. A good and cheap experience every time, but I do of course make sure I have all my papers and passport correctly (including the input at the website). Otherwise you are asking for trouble, like virtually for all other flight companies in the world. Notice that this is especially important if you are taking an American flight. The refusal rate on those flights are the highest in the world, because they can stop you boarding for no reasons at all, f.ex if they don’t like your face, hell yeah.
If you managed to double book or type your name wrong, that’s your error 100%. Why not go to My Booking at their website and see what you have booked, before you start booking another one. If the website should have error-checks for any possible type of error, it would make no sense at all and many times it would be a show stopper. In many cases, believe me or not, people would have to double book seats, f.example people carrying a contrabass needs an extra seat for their instrument. Also fat people often need to book 2 seats (I can’t believe you are American and haven’t heard about this). Booking of extra/double seats for the same person is not an security issue. In any case you would have to show up at the airport and then show your passport. You are stupid if you think a disguised person would be able to take one of the seats which you double booked. Tell me how would that work out in real life at the airport? It would not be possible, thus it’s not an security issue at all.
I often also buy flight and seats, which I never intend to use (because many countries require stupid onward journey). According to your “invented international rules”, that also sounds like a security issue? In my case I just find a cheap flight, book it and never show up. I hate to buy a refund ticket, they are so expensive and refund take time. So its much better to buy a 30 USD dollar flight, and consider the money as lost. It’s just small money anyway. That is much better than standing at the airport and look stupid because you don’t have an onward flight out of the country. In many cases the flight company won’t allow you to board, because of the 50.000 USD penalty they risk according to international law.
For the price Cebu Pacific offers, they can’t be beaten. But don’t expect the prices to keep low, if there would be thousands of American trouble makers booking their flights. Because that would require Cebu Pacific to employ masses of administrative resources and service personnel.
I don’t mind allowing Lenny to comment but it sounds like he is a paid consultant for Cebu or its advertisers. This is because it is a rare bird who hasn’t had trouble getting proper refunds from Cebu for a security guard being hard nosed on behalf of the airlines–i.e. overriding the Philippine Transport immigration officials recommendations, in our case.
The audacity of giving a refund that is a percentage of a plane ticket’s cost and then only giving the passengers 90 days to use the refund voucher is super-rude and tells people to search elsewhere for service.
Like Vouchers? You’ll Love Mitt Romney
Nov 16, 2011 | By ThinkProgress War Room
Let Them Have Coupons!
Have you ever been stranded somewhere and received a voucher from an airline? It probably helped a little, but still didn’t cover the cost of your food or hotel room. You were still stuck with the rest of the bill.
Well, that’s kind of how Mitt Romney and other Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) want to run the government — just give you a voucher, throw you to the private sector, and too bad if it’s not enough. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains:
So what lies behind the Republican obsession with privatization and voucherization? Ideology, of course. It’s literally a fundamental article of faith in the GOP that the private sector is always better than the government, and no amount of evidence can shake that credo.
In fact, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Republicans are especially eager to dismantle government programs that act as living demonstrations that their ideology is wrong. Bloated military budgets don’t bother them much – Romney has pledged to reverse President Barack Obama‘s defense cuts, despite the fact that no such cuts have actually taken place. But successful programs like veterans’ health, Social Security and Medicare are in the crosshairs.
Let’s go through two of the worst examples of this extreme ideology in practice.
Vouchers for Veterans
On Veterans Day, Mitt Romney was speaking to a group of veterans in South Carolina. His big idea: give veterans vouchers and throw them to private insurance companies instead of relying the Veterans Administration, one of the most successful, efficient health care systems in America. ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky has the quote:
Sometimes you wonder if there would be some way to introduce some private-sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, that each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them, and then they can choose whether they want to go in the government system or in a private system with the money that follows them,” said Romney. “Like what happens with schools in Florida, where people have a voucher that goes with them. Who knows?
Other than completely undermining the VA, there’s another big problem with this idea. Veterans hate it:
“The VFW doesn’t support privatization of veterans health care,” [VFW spokesman Jerry Newberry] told TPM. “This is an issue that seems to come around every election cycle.”
John McCain proposed a similar idea during his 2008 presidential campaign and it went over like a lead balloon:
AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars argued that while veterans should have access to private care, providing “rural veterans greater access to VA-sponsored care exclusively through private providers” would undermine the existing health care system. In their annual report, “The Independent Budget,” the groups argued:
– “The VA’s specialized health-care programs…would suffer irreparable impact by the loss of veterans from those programs.”
– “The VA’s medical and prosthetic research program…would lose focus and purpose were service-connected and other enrolled veterans no longer present in VA health care.”
– If veterans turned to private practice, “they would lose the many safeguards built into the VA system through its patient safety program, evidence-based medicine, electronic medical records and bar code medication administration,” resulting in “lower quality of care for those who deserve it most.”
Vouchers for Grandma Too
Here’s Mitt Romney explaining his Medicare plan — vouchers:
You have a program like Paul Ryan has proposed, which says we’re going to give people vouchers to let them choose among private plans. I think that idea has a good deal of merit.
That Paul Ryan plan that Romney references? That’s the one that ends Medicare and doubles out of pocket costs for seniors because it takes away their guaranteed benefits and replaces them with, you guessed it, a voucher to go buy private insurance. Romney of course fully endorsed the wildly unpopular Ryan plan earlier this year.
Romney’s own plan would keep traditional Medicare alongside his voucher plan, but that would still seriously undermine Medicare. And what does Paul Ryan think of Romney’s plan? He loves it:
It is fair to say that the often optimistic and cheery Ryan was downright effusive about the contents of the plan.
Ryan told me, “Look at what he put out! This is a great development. It shows that the elusive adult conversation is taking place, but all on one side.” He ticked off the proposals including block-granting, cutting the federal workforce and entitlement reform. He said, “This tracks perfectly with the House budget.”
As Paul Krugman writes, “Any Republican would, if elected president, set out to undermine precisely those government programs that work best.” Put another way, Republican 1 Percenters like Mitt Romney are most eager to go after the government programs that both work best and are most heavily depended upon by the other 99 Percent.
What do you mean? Did you get refund on that double ticket that in practice was a no-show? I never managed to get refund for a no-show ticket. For example one time I overslept, still I tried to get a refund, but understandably I did not.
Cebu Pacific is really too kind to you. Don’t forget it’s a point-to-point low-budget carrier. If you cannot accept this, just take a 10 times more expensive flight with Catay Pacific, they probably put you in a 5 star hotel if you are stranded somewhere.
I am from Norway, I have no relations to Cebu Pacific whatsoever.
If you are American citizen, you would not now about the hard-nosed people in Homeland Security. I hate to go to USA, that’s the only country they treat me as a criminal suspect when I board the plane or arrive the immigration. And I have been to 50 different country so far in my life.
NO NO-Show. What do you mean by NO-SHOW??
Only Cebu Pacific paid personnel refused my wife boarding.
As I noted, I showed my wife’s visa and my Taiwanese work permit to the PHilippines Immigration officer and he said point blank, “He would have allowed my wife to board.”
My wife had to then take our baby and leave the Airport as I boarded our Cebu flight and went to work in Taiwan.
In short, it was a clear case of the Cebu Pacific staff being more hawkish on Filipino citizens going to Taiwan than the Filipino Immigration Head at the airport.
The Filipino Immigration officer explained that they only bow to the airlines decision. (They would have rather allowed my wife and 8 month old child to return with me to live and work in Taiwan as the Taiwanese immigration officer had told us we could do the week priotr.)
i just booked my return flight march 18 2012 and then i double checked it, then when i got the itenarary reciept the date changed to march 19. then i called thier hotline and they want to charged me a changed of booking fee about 2,400 pesos that it wasnt my fault, thier system online sucks.
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