Kudos to Cebu Pacific...

...for their quality customer service despite the fact that our original flight schedule was cancelled.

I don't really check my Yahoo! emails unless there are some valid stuff I am waiting on. (When I say valid - that is anything that is not related to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other social networking stuff). For some reason (and surprisingly at 5 AM), I opened Yahoo! mail on my iPhone and saw the words - Cebu. Pacific. Cancelled. - and then I found my heart beat racing and my senses fully awake. The other keywords were SORRY. INCONVENIENCE. AIRCRAFT SITUATION. CALL US. Whew. Okay, so there is a phone number and I dialed it. I was so nega at this time I was actually thinking about how long I will have to stay in the queue. Surprisingly, in less than a minute I got hold of an agent, who was very polite and sounded very knowledgeable. He explained that I could cancel the entire booking without any fees... blah blah blah... I felt really bad and was ready to drop the phone. HOWEVERRRRR, towards the end of the call, he said, "You also have the option to choose from the other schedules TODAY." I had to ask him again if I heard the right thing. I gave a sigh of relief. He rebooked our flight from the original departure time of 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM. And. With the same seats! :-)

Overall the experience was really wonderful for me. I love the fact that they sent notifications early (via email and SMS) and that they are also able to make adjustments easily on the phone. I feel though that Cebu Pacific should actually refund the price difference between the original flight and the new schedule. Reason is, this could be perceived as a sales strategy where they sell the premium schedules at a more expensive rate and then cancel it at a later time and eventually force the passenger to get a less desirable flight schedule, at the premium price. Anyway, the Cebu Pacific reservations officer acknowledged my concern and actually told me that they value my feedback and consider these types of comments as room for improvement.

Kudos to Cebu Pacific. My perception of you as underdog to PAL has reversed 180 degrees. Keep it up!