MANILA, Philippines — Cebu Pacific has sought consideration from their customers in the processing of refunds brought by travel cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the process may take six months.
According to the company, they have already refunded P2.4 billion worth of booking cancellations due to the pandemic, which corresponds to half of all the refund requests made. This also means that they are halfway past the refunds lodged in April.
“To date, we have refunded over PHP 2.4 billion booking cancellations related to COVID-19, equivalent to 50% of refund requests received. We remain committed to our customers to complete pending refunds, and will update them once these have been processed. We are currently halfway through refund requests filed last April,” Cebu Pacific said in a statement on Thursday.
“We understand how challenging this whole situation is, and we sincerely apologize for the delay. At present, refunds may take up to six (6) months to process from the time the request was filed. We thank our guests for their patience and understanding as we continue to enhance our processes for this to be resolved soonest,” it added.
Cebu Pacific said it has been hard for the airline to process the requests since the company has been hard-hit by the pandemic, due to restricted travel and limited tourism. Another issue is that the airline is operating only “10 percent of its pre-COVID network.”
“Since the start of this pandemic, we have received an unprecedented number of refund requests due to the flight cancellations brought about by the lockdown,” the airliner’s management stressed.
“Our refund process then was originally not designed to handle this volume of requests, and this resulted in a backlog. We have since then revamped our procedures in order to address this,” it added.
Cebu Pacific is only one of the several airline companies and tourism-related industries affected by the health crisis. Other businesses like tour providers, land transportation services, and hotels and restaurants have closed shops due to lack of income.
According to the Air Carriers Association of the Philippines, the whole airline industry is set to lose around P250 billion. Both Cebu Pacific and top competitor Philippine Airlines have also implemented layoffs to ensure that the companies are still operational.