Mike Wootton
Mike Wootton

I had to take a trip to Palawan for an important meeting last Friday. A recently adopted habit is to use SkyScanner to try to find the best ticket price and usually it works quite well, particularly for medium to long haul routes. The volatility of air ticket prices on Philippine “budget” airlines seems, however, now to have confounded the ability of SkyScanner’s data sources to the extent that the prices shown become suddenly not available part of the way through the booking process. The cheapest fare available and booked eventually some days in advance was about P10,600 return, which compares to a more regular price of about P3,000. For various reasons it was necessary to return earlier than booked to Manila, so an obvious option was to take the preceding flight with the same carrier Air Asia/Zest on which there were apparently spare seats. The charge for this change was P8,200. The total charge, therefore, for a trip from Manila to a meeting in Palawan is over $400! It’s less expensive to fly to Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore or Bangkok.

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