天美麻豆

@Lotus Eater

Like you know my favourite airline is Qatar but my last 3 visits have been with Qatar, Cathay Pacific and Saudi Airlines and I think out of my 8 visits to the Philippines I have only booked directly with the airline twice including last time with Qatar. You also know that I am dabbling with the idea of going back late August for about a month but I am a bit concerned about going in typhoon season. I know going then would be risky and local flights, ferries,etc could be cancelled or re-sheduled due to bad weather but I have found flights with Singapore Airlines, flying from Manchester to Singapore (spending 3 nights there) before my onward trip to Cebu (direct flight). This is departing Manchester on 24 August and returning from Cebu to Manchester via Singapore on 22 September. This trip is by far the cheapest I could find and avoids any of the possible disruption that could occur if the war in the Middle East flares up again.

One thing I would like to ask members of this forum who live in the Philippines is - what is your experience of the weather over there in September and are there any places less likely to experience typhoons and tropical storms? Googling this gave me a mixed bag of answers including avoid travelling in September to places like Palawan, Boracay, and parts of Mindanao seem to escape the worst of it. I would be committed to spending some time in Lapu Lapu and maybe Moalboal but would like to travel around a bit more.

Thank you.

@Cherryann01

CA you have as you state flown with three different airlines to the Philippines in the last 3 years or so. The Cathay Pacific airmiles disappear after 18 months so they are now down the proverbial swanny. Saudi Airmiles redemption are virtually impossible via their website. My neighbour as you know is leaving for Dumaguete on the 25 of this month and he could not redeem his miles.聽 He said to me 鈥楲otus you were right all along I should have gone with Etihad鈥� who he has now booked with. He will be flying again with his Filipina partner and son in December with the airline so will have a fortune in airmiles and will qualify for Silver status - priority check in and priority fast track baggage retrieval. After the first outgoing flight he will hit Gold status and can use the Business class lounge.

Qatar Airways have a return flight to Manila on the dates you have given for 拢721 (your flight with Singapore is over 拢900). You can stay in a good 4 star hotel in Doha for 拢90 for three nights. You will not get those prices in Singapore. Ok you have to buy a Manila-Cebu return which is cheap. You can use your Qatar Airmiles from your last trip in November as part payment. If their is another escalation in the gulf conflict (assuming no peace deal has been announced) Qatar will either refund your fare or if you like route you on another airline which may well be Singapore. You can cancel Doha hotels at 48 hours notice before arrival and get a full refund.

We have discussed this but for other potential visitors planning a trip to the Philippines the next 4 months will not only be Typhoon season but the Met office has given notification that the El Nino phenomenon that is forming right now in the Pacific ocean will accentuate the strength of Typhoons hitting the country. September gets more Typhoons than any other month. After October the next few months are forecast to have considerably less rainfall and Typhoon activity than normal.

No brainer ? 馃��

I flew on Philippine Airlines (PAL)聽 two months ago from Los Angeles to Manila to Davao.聽 I had previously flew PAL going from Manila to Davao and Davao to Cebu (economy seats).聽 Nice airline, but in my latest flight I booked business class for both legs of the journey and was a bit underwhelmed.聽 I thought it would be similar to other airlines where you would get a semi-private space, but in my honest opinion it felt more like premium economy with the seats right against each other and no partition separating them.聽 Maybe Qatar's business class jaded me in that aspect.聽 I liked the service and food, but the seat left a lot to be desired.聽 I also got to enjoy the One Alliance lounge at LAX and the lounge at NAIA.聽 I was actually a bit impressed with the one at NAIA as I was expecting the worst.聽 My advice is if you do choose business class with PAL do not choose a front row seat.聽 There is no place for you to store extra baggage and if you put it in front of you next to the wall the attendants will make you move it to the overhead bins.聽 The 2nd row seats (and further back) have storage under the seats in front of you to store items.

Typhoons hit the east harder than the west and the north worse than the south although you will find exceptions to this. Locations with airports that can handle jet aircraft are less disrupted than those (like El Nido) that can only handle propellers. I'm a frequent traveller to the Philippines and pay no regard to time of year but if I was planning infrequent holidays I would choose to avoid typhoon season. Things do get back to normal quickly (I was in El Nido when it got clobbered last year and three days later it was back to normal) but why put up with it at all?

I have decided not to proceed and wait until about November after seeing videos of flooding in parts of Cebu and Davao recently and I am also concerned about internal flights and ferry crossings being affected by any possible storms.

In the meantime聽 I will try to arrange a visit to go see my lovely daughter in Bournemouth and since the rail prices in the UK are so expensive I may decide to add a few days on to my trip and take a slight detour, maybe via Agadir haha. I will take a look at where I can fly from my local airport and then see which flight go into Bournemouth or a nearby airport and save on the extortionate rail fare one way. Off course it will cost much more when everything is taken into account.

Philippine Airlines(PAL) is the very last choice of an airline that I will patronize. They destroyed 2-pieces of luggage(travel bags). I sent photos 鈥渢he before & after) and a write-up with no response, even with a follow-up. I do not care about frequent flyer miles any longer with any airline because of negative experiences.

I pay for the route that is the most convenient & expedient. There are other airlines that I have observed negatively, but there鈥檚 nothing in it for me to disparage them, only PAL. It may be good for some, but for me, after traveling several times for聽 many years with them; I place myself on the no-fly. I鈥榣l take any other airline, willing to suffer layovers.

I have flown with Philippine Airlines only once and to be honest I had no problems and had no choice at the time. I flew from Manila to London Heathrow because my original flight with Cathay Pacific to Manchester, via Hong Kong developed technical issues after we had pulled back from the gate and were nearly ready to line up on the runway for takeoff. We went back to the gate to get the problem fixed, went back out again and the problem happened again so by that time the pilot said it was too late to take off. We were all put up in a hotel overnight and joined the Philippine Airlines flight to Heathrow early the next morning.

I now prefer Qatar Airlines but have flown with several over airlines also.

An interesting white-wash of their safety?馃檪?

@Cherryann01

We were all put up in a hotel overnight

Was that the airport hotel where you stated that the bedroom was infested with cockroaches? Can you recall the hotel name ?

Qantas is part of One World too so Aussie frequent flyers will be able to avail themselves of points for Philippines Airlines flights

Interesting answer to the topic ..

The Philippines is a country built for flying.

More than 7,600 islands are scattered across a stretch of ocean bigger than Spain, and no bridge or highway will ever stitch them together.

A ferry from Manila to a beach in Palawan or a diving spot in Siargao can swallow the better part of a day, while a flight covers the same water in a little over an hour.

Add a vast overseas workforce shuttling between home provinces and jobs across the Gulf and East Asia, and you have a nation where aviation is less a convenience than the glue holding the map together.

The Philippines also carries some historical baggage in the air. The country spent three years on the European Union's list of banned carriers from 2010, and its regulator has long wrestled with international audit ratings. That makes the safety of its airlines a fair question to ask. So how do they actually rate today?

Philippine Airlines 鈥� 7/7

The flag carrier tops the table with a perfect seven-star safety rating, but its road to that score has been anything but smooth.

Philippine Airlines is the oldest name in Asian commercial aviation, taking to the skies in March 1941 as the continent's first airline and flying its first route between Manila and Baguio in a small Beechcraft. The decades since have been eventful in every sense. PAL built a sprawling international network, then nearly came apart during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, briefly shutting down and entering receivership in 1998 before clawing its way back. A second brush with collapse came during the pandemic, when the carrier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2021 and emerged leaner the following year.

Whilst it's history is chequered, it deserves its current 7/7 safety rating.

Its safety history is genuinely chequered, and it is worth being honest about that. Across more than eight decades PAL has recorded a string of fatal accidents, most of them in the propeller era and the years of political turbulence that came with it. The airline endured a wave of hijackings through the 1970s and 1980s, a sabotage bombing that brought down Flight 215 near Cabanatuan in 1970, and a run of fatal crashes involving its ageing turboprops, culminating in the 1987 loss of Flight 206 into Mount Ugu near Baguio in poor visibility, which killed all 50 on board. In 1990 a centre fuel tank explosion on a Boeing 737 at the gate in Manila killed eight. Then, on 11 December 1994, a bomb planted by terrorist Ramzi Yousef tore through the cabin of Flight 434, a Boeing 747 bound for Tokyo, killing one passenger. That attack was a test run for the wider Bojinka plot, and the veteran captain's feat in landing the crippled jet has become a case study in airmanship.

The point of that history is how firmly it now sits in the past.

The modern PAL flies a young, largely Airbus fleet spanning A321neos, A330s and A350s, topped by its new flagship, the A350-1000. It reaches around 30 domestic and more than 40 international destinations across Asia, North America and Oceania, including ultra-long-haul services to New York and Toronto. The carrier is IOSA registered, meets international operating safety standards and sits under no EU flight ban.

Crucially, it records no fatal accidents over the past ten years and no recent pilot-related serious incidents. For an airline that has survived financial ruin, terrorism and its own accident-scarred history, its safety credentials now stand among the strongest in the region.

PAL Express 鈥� 7/7

The flag carrier's regional arm matches its parent with a seven-star rating, and it carries a heavy piece of history of its own.

PAL Express is the airline that today flies much of the Philippines' island-hopping network, threading Airbus jets and De Havilland Canada Dash 8 turboprops into the smaller provincial strips that the mainline fleet cannot serve.

Its roots, however, lie in Air Philippines, a carrier that later rebranded as Airphil Express and finally as PAL Express in 2008 once it had been folded fully into the PAL group.

That lineage matters, because Air Philippines was responsible for the single worst accident in the country's history. On 19 April 2000 Flight 541, a Boeing 737-200, went around after finding the runway at Davao still occupied, then descended below a safe altitude in cloud and struck a hillside on Samal Island, killing all 131 people on board. Investigators attributed the crash to the crew continuing a visual approach in instrument conditions.

A quarter of a century on, the operation that grew out of that tragedy earns the full seven stars. PAL Express is IOSA registered, meets international operating safety standards and carries no EU flight ban, and it holds a clean record on fatal accidents and pilot-related incidents across the past decade.

It is a reminder that a carrier's present-day safety standing is built on the lessons of its past rather than erased by it.

Cebu Pacific 鈥� 7/7

The country's largest carrier by fleet and passenger numbers matches the flag carrier with a seven-star safety rating. ... Snip ..

happy trails ppl聽

@Cherryann01We were all put up in a hotel overnightWas that the airport hotel where you stated that the bedroom was infested with cockroaches? Can you recall the hotel name ? - @Lotus Eater

No not the cockroach infested hotel. I am not sure but it may have been the Savoy or Belmont Hotel. I did not get much sleep that night due to the late time of arrival at the hotel and the early departure the next morning. I do remember that it was a decent enough hotel and had no complaints apart from not being told what time the coach was leaving for the airport in the morning and only finding out when I went for breakfast. This of course was the airlines fault who organised the transportation.

The cockroach infested hotel was on another trip and was located in Pasay City. I remember getting a meal there and when I asked for a beer the woman nipped聽 out to a store to get me a couple or three.