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If you can make it to New York, can you really make it anywhere?
Philippine Airlines president and COO Jaime Bautista guested on Bloomberg’s Bottom Line a few hours ago where he was asked about the resumption of the airline’s Manila-New York flight after 17 years. PAL’s top guy may have looked calm and collected on camera, but his voice said something else. We’d be worried too, if we didn’t prepare for an interview.
Was he really expecting softball questions from Bloomberg? When host Mark Crumpton asked Bautista how the strong dollar is impacting PAL’s business, Bautista replied, “Well it doesn’t really impact us because we are a company that reports in US dollars…most of our revenues are in foreign currencies. Even sales in the Philippines for foreign flights are based in US dollars.”
Well that’s one really simple way of looking at it.
But the most embarrassing part comes in the end, when Bautista is asked how PAL plans to compete with the big guns — Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines — for market share in Asia-Pacific. His answer? “We cater to the Filipino market and they feel that when they take Philippine Airlines flights, they are already in their home. That’s why we are ‘Philippine Airlines: Your Home In The Sky’.”
Good work plugging PAL’s slogan, boss. Now can we go back to staring into our wine glass?
