UPGRADES MAKE PHILIPPINES EVEN MORE
ATTRACTIVE TO FOREIGN INVESTORS
FOLLOWING MOODY'S CREDIT RATING UPGRADE FOR THE PHILIPPINES, Moody's Investors Service next day raised the foreign currency deposit rating of the country's seven biggest banks.
The seven comprise two government banks: Land Bank of the Philippines and Development Bank of the Philippines, together with five owned by big conglomerates: Banco de Oro Unibank, Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Metrobank Group, Philippine National Bank and Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Moody's also stated that two others, Allied Banking Corp and United Coconut Planters Bank, were unaffected as none of their ratings are constrained by the deposit or debt ceilings of the Philippines.
Moody's is an essential component of the global capital markets, providing credit ratings, research, tools and analysis that contribute to transparent and integrated financial markets. Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO) is the parent company of Moody's Investors Service, which provides credit ratings and research covering debt instruments and securities, and Moody's Analytics, which offers leading-edge software, advisory services and research for credit analysis, economic research and financial risk management. The Corporation, which reported revenue of $2 billion in 2010, employs approximately 4,500 people worldwide and maintains a presence in 26 countries. Further information is available at www.moodys.com.
Philippine Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said the upgrades reflect President Aquino's efforts to fight corruption and put fiscal reforms in place, and also help the Philippines become a more favorable destination for foreign investments.
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BEWARE!!! BEWARE!!! BEWARE!!!
"FUN TOUR" PROMOS
OF CEBU PACIFIC AIR
CEBU PACIFIC'S ONLINE CHEAP FLIGHT PROMOS ARE GENERALLY FINE BUT IF YOU BOOK A "FUN TOUR" PACKAGE TO INCLUDE A HOTEL STAY, YOUR TRIP CAN BECOME A NIGHTMARE.
Some friends of mine booked a 5 day 4 night "Fun Tour" with Cebu Pacific and paid in full online 3 months in advance including the 4 night stay at a hotel chosen from the recommended list on the Cebu Pacific website.
Before their trip, on searching for the hotel's website to print out a location map, they discovered to their astonishment that the hotel had closed down almost 2 weeks previously, yet no word of this had been communicated to them by Cebu Pacific.
Then came the serious problem with CP's online bookings: contacting anyone about them is almost impossible. Their website gives no email address. Just "Hotline" telephone numbers in Manila and Cebu that are permanently busy.
My friends spent nearly a whole day repeatedly dialling before at last getting through. But these "Hotlines" are not to Cebu Pacific. They are to a Call Center with the function of filtering, taking notes, and passing queries to a supervisor who decides whether or not to pass them on to Cebu Pacific. It's a slow, laborious, frustrating, inconvenient, costly (you're paying for phone call) process.
In this case my friends' message was considered serious enough to pass on, and some hours later they received a call from Cebu Pacific saying they had contacted the destination hotel which informed them it had only been closed for a single day and there was no problem with it.
My friends questioned this because it contradicted the notice on the hotel's own official website, and were asked to hold while Cebu Pacific double-checked. The caller, who gave no name or direct line for future contact, returned to say the hotel had confirmed it was open and there would be no problem. "Just go there." So they did.
"Fun Tour" was Nightmare Trip for vacationers who booked Cebu Pacific online promo.
Upon late night arrival at the destination airport and clearance through immigration and customs, they encountered another regular difficulty with "Fun Tour" promos. No transportation to hotel is included. After trying unsuccessfully to find a bus going in the right direction, they were finally forced to take a taxi, which cost them as much as a night at the hotel, which they reached at about 2am.
When they got there, the door was open but the reception desk was unattended. Calling out and knocking on the counter a few times eventually resulted in the appearance of someone clearly irritated at being disturbed. She looked at the reservation details on the Cebu Pacific e-ticket, brought a man out from inside and told my friends to follow him.
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The man, whose manner was equally disinterested and offhand, made no attempt to help carry their baggage and walked out of the hotel into the street, where it had started to rain. Carrying their own baggage and struggling to keep up, my friends followed him in the rain through narrow dimly lit streets, then up some stairs, through an empty building, down the stairs on the other side and further along another dark and wet street to end up at a different hotel.
This hotel was part of the same group of budget hotels, but it was not the one my friends had chosen and did not provide the same room facilities. The hotel receptionist was aggressively rude on being questioned about the one they had booked, confirming that it had permanently closed and adding that if my friends did not like this one they could get out and go somewhere else.
They pointed out that they had paid for 4 nights in advance, had already lost half of the first night, and asked if they could get their money back. The receptionist replied that they had paid the owner, not him, and there would be no refund if they did not stay there. He then demanded a substantial deposit for the room key, although no such deposit was mentioned on the Cebu Pacific website.
The Cebu Pacific e-ticket shows 4 nights' stay with checkout on Friday September 30.
By then it was too late and my friends were too tired to search for another hotel, and without refund they did not have enough spare cash to pay another hotel for the same 4 nights they had already paid Cebu Pacific for. Reluctantly they paid the room key deposit and stayed there 4 nights.
On the positive side, next morning their included American breakfast was fine, and the hotel's eatery staff were efficient and friendly. When they wandered out to walk around, they found that the location was in a tourist area largely frequented by backpackers so there was plenty of cheap transportation for sightseeing and a pickup point nearby for the airport shuttle bus.
However, my friends' "Fun Tour" package vacation nightmare was by no means over. The worst part was yet to come...
- Edu Garcia (Story of Cebu Pacific customers' ongoing nightmare to be continued.)
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EARLIER IN 2011 it was announced by Cebu Pacific's President and CEO Lance Gokongwei that the Philippines' biggest airline had just placed the "biggest aircraft order ever made by a Philippine carrier". Deliveries of 30 Airbus A321neos and 7 Airbus A320s will start in 2015, augmenting the 18 A320s already on order for delivery starting this year, and the company has an option for 10 more A321neos which can carry more people and fly further than the A320s. Mr. Gokongwei said: "The A320 Family has played a key role in enabling us to build an efficient, profitable, value-based business. The 220-seater A321neo will be a game changer for Cebu Pacific. We will be able to serve cities in Australia, India and northern Japan." Airbus is itself an inspiring success story that began in 1967 when government ministers from Britain, France and Germany met in London to launch a European consortium for development of the A300 and compete with the Americans who then held more than 80 per cent of the world market. Today it's a large, complex, high-tech operation based at Toulouse, France, and it now consistently captures about half of all commercial airliner orders.
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Email our publishers for a free copy of our e-book "F3 Filipino Feelgood Factor", which is a short fiction story plus (in the same digital edition) a compilation from some of the original books that inspired The Secret movie. It will be emailed directly to you as a PDF attachment. You'll need a free Adobe Reader on your computer (click on above logo if you don't have it).
This e-book won't cost you a single centavo, because we are sponsoring this bundled digital version of F3 for our publishers to distribute free, and all the original books on which The Secret was based are out-of-copyright, so there are no royalty fees to pay on them. English language of around a century ago may seem old-fashioned to us today, but the selections are easy to read and will tell you all you want to know about the Law Of Attraction and more in greater detail than the TV movie or its tie-in book.
FREE is a pretty good deal compared with paying a mentor/coach to tell you the same thing, or buying expensive new books on the subject by authors who merely rehash out-of-copyright books into modern English as if the original content was theirs.
New in 2012, our publishers have another edition (above right) - this time sponsored by Santa Rosa Magazine - for Filipinos, which features Jose Rizal's non-fiction classic "The Philippines A Hundred Years Hence" with the "F3 Filipino Feelgood Factor" short fiction story as a modern lead-in. This bundle includes Rizal's ignored Defence and the Farewell Address that he wrote 15 days before his execution by the Spanish occupying forces, who banned it from release to the Philippine people.
The Philippine bundle is also FREE, and if you want both bundles just say so in your email to our publishers and they will send both to you ABSOLUTELY FREE.
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FILIPINO FEELGOOD FACTOR 21st CENTURY PHILIPPINES
ANGEL TUGADO'S SYDICATED PAGE OF COMMENTS ON PHILIPPINE NEWS
MAGAZINE OF SANTA ROSA CITY LAGUNA PHILIPPINES SINCE 2007
MAGAZINE OF SANTA ROSA CITY LAGUNA PHILIPPINES SPECIAL FEATURES
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