Foreign carriers have announced plans to suspend flights to Kalibo, the main international airfield serving the resort island of Boracay in the Philippines, after the central government moved towards banning all tourists from Boracay for a period of six months citing hazardous environmental conditions.
In February, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte condemned the island as a “cesspool” after learning that vast quantities of raw sewage were being discharged from local hotels into stormdrains. “I’ll give you six months," he told Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu. "Clean the goddamn thing.”
Boracay Island is a popular holiday resort with more than two million tourists visiting last year. As of February this year, the national tourism board showed 262,000 foreigners had visited the island of which a significant proportion were Korean and Chinese.
So far, Air Seoul has announced it will suspend its services to Kalibo from April 26 onwards with Jin Air (LJ, Jeju) considering following suit.
"Recently, the Philippine government has closed some resorts due to environmental pollution problems, and it is known that the whole island will be closed, so many customers have been questioning whether they could travel normally," an Air Seoul official told Yonhap. "We decided to suspend our operation temporarily because of the potential impact on our customers."
Other carriers active in the Kalibo/Boracay market include Philippine Airlines, Cebu Pacific Air, Pan Pacific Airlines, Philippines AirAsia, Scoot, SilkAir, Okay Airways, Sichuan Airlines, Xiamen Airlines, AirAsia, and Cebgo.
