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Join me on my short hop from Manila to Bohol on Cebu Pacific’s A321 in Economy!
My family and I used to live in Manila, and visited again this summer to see family, and after a week we decided to take a short family vacation to Bohol, a place we never had the chance to visit while we lived in the Philippines.
Manila is renowned for intense traffic, but for whatever reason, the roads were empty the morning of our flight! So, we got to NAIA’s (Ninoy Aquino International Airport) Terminal 3, the newest out of the airports 4 terminals, and headed to the Cebu Pacific bag drop because we had already printed out our boarding passes. Even if we hadn’t there were multiple kiosks where you could print them out. Bag drop had a line but with many agents working, it moved fairly quickly and soon enough we headed to a pretty empty security line (honestly at this point I was shocked, I had never had such a stress-free time at Manila Airport).
Short lines in MNL!!
The only metaphorical “bump” we hit was when the gate changed from a jet bridge gate to a gate 133A, meaning bus-boarding.
Cebu Pacific is lowkey renowned for delays, and our flight (5J 615) had been late every day in the week prior to our flight. So, one can imagine my surprise when they called boarding on time! My family and I got in line and boarded the bus which would take us to our A321, and I was again pleasantly surprised to see a REALLY nice bus pick us up, it was just not something one would expect from a low-cost carrier.
The weirdly nice bus...
We got to the plane and AGAIN I was extremely happy, not just because I’m an av-geek and got to be "up close and personal with our plane, but because we would be flying on an A321, and I had never flown Cebu Pacific's 321 before! We took our seats while the rest of the plane boarded extremely quickly.
Boarding in MNL
The seats on Cebu Pacific do not recline and have very limited leg space, but this isn’t an issue on a one hour flight, and also as I said about EasyJet, you get what you pay for; and in this case it really wasn’t much. We then pushed back, and headed to the runway with literally no queue, again a rarity in Manila. We took off and were airborne, on time. What an all-around amazing airport experience out on MNL!
Tight fit for being over 6 ft. tall!
Being only a one-hour flight, there wasn’t much to do, so I got to work catching up on some college essays, and blog posts. Crew did come by once offering snacks and beverages for purchase (none of which I didn’t bought). Something else the crew did that I thought was cool, was that they played games with us! Over the PA they played some sort of georgraphy trivia game, and if you knew the answer you would press the FA call button and win a prize! Super fun and unique!
Soon enough, the captain announced that we had commenced our decent into Bohol, so I spent the rest of the fight looking out of the window and the amazing view of the Philippine Islands.
After a rough approach, avoiding quite a few storm clouds, we arrived in Bohol a few minutes early. What a great flight!
Overall- 9/10
I thought this flight with Cebu Pacific was amazing, it checked all the boxes for a short flight. Left on time, arrived early, okay seats, cheap airfare, and great crew!
Seat- 7/10
This rating would be a lot lower if the flight were longer...
IFE- N/A
No IFE
Food- N/A
Food available for purchase
Service- 10/10
Typical Filipino hospitality, fantastic!
Timeliness- 10/10
Arrived early!
Overall- a fantastic flight, and although the seats aren’t amazing, the flight was very cheap and only an hour long, so nothing to complain about.