Hell on our doorstep
Rough Trade, Dec. 14, 2025
I hate Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). I hate it with the fire of 1,000 suns. There is a word in my native dialect that we use to describe places such as NAIA, which begins with the letters “shi-” and ends with the letters “-thole.” I used to refer to NAIA, which is routinely adjudged one of the World’s Worst Airports on every annual list of such things, as “Asia’s LaGuardia,” after the famously bad airport in New York City, but I’ve had to change that tune. Henceforth, every terrible airport everywhere else will be known as “(name of country’s) NAIA.”
I put the blame for this squarely in the lap of the San Miguel Corp. (SMC)-led New NAIA Infrastructure Corporation (NNIC), which took over operation of the airport on September 14 of last year. Prior to that date, NAIA was merely awful; now it is completely horrifying. I spent a few days of much-needed rest in my favorite getaway spot in Palawan over the recent long holiday weekend, which was a wonderfully therapeutic and soul-refreshing experience. Having that bookended by the vile tragedy of having to depart from and return to NAIA was most unfortunate, to say the least.
On this particular flight, I was consigned to using Terminal 3, and this is what that experience was like: Arriving at the airport early Saturday morning (Dec. 6) was typically chaotic, with a great deal of traffic at the departure curb, but that is to be expected. However, the persecution really begins once one steps into the terminal, and is confronted by an apparent recent “upgrade” that requires every passenger to print his or her own luggage tags at a computerized kiosk. This machine is not exactly user-friendly, nor are the few cheerless airport personnel in the vicinity, whose only helpful instruction to anyone not familiar with the routine is, “well, you have to fall in line.” And then fall in line again to actually hand your bags over. So in essence, this particular innovation which I guess some genius thought would make things more efficient simply adds a pointless extra line and process step.
After physically dropping off one’s bags, it is then necessary to wade through the crowd in front of the check-in counters in order to move toward the security check. It has always been like this in Terminal 3, and one would think that correcting the flow of foot traffic would have been an easy, low-cost fix for the experts working for a company run by “Mr. Infrastructure,” but one would apparently be wrong on that.
Somewhere in between the tangle of people in the check-in area and the security checkpoint leading to the departure, one should be able to visit the brand-new Food Hall located in the Terminal 3 mezzanine, which opened with much fanfare just this past October. How does one reach this new feature? Beats the hell out of me; there are no signs pointing the way, and the two escalators leading in that direction are non-functioning and barricaded. There are some food and other outlets in the concourse, but since it is dreadfully overcrowded – a consequence of the poor design of the terminal, aggravated by large areas being blocked off for construction work – they are only appealing to those who are desperately hungry or thirsty. I have a favorite spot for an arrival breakfast in Puerto Princesa, so I could suck it up and go stand by the gate (stand, because there is about one-tenth the number of seats needed for waiting passengers) for the relatively short time until my flight was ready for boarding.
Getting away from NAIA was bad enough; returning to it was an absolute nightmare. First, there is exactly one (1) rest room each available for men and ladies in the baggage claim area, so that one’s discomfort at having to walk the entire length of the arrival concourse and ride down an escalator to reach the facilities is enhanced by having to wait in a long line of similarly uncomfortable arriving passengers.
Second, the system for organizing arriving luggage is apparently random. Although there was an information sign indicating that a couple of flights were to be unloading at one carousel, neither of those were at that carousel, whereas mine (which never appeared on any of the signs) was. I think this is an airport thing rather than a Terminal 3 thing; my previous return flight a few months ago docked at Terminal 2, and the same thing happened there, although in that case there was at least a helpful Philippine Airlines employee on hand to point passengers in the right direction.
Finally, escaping the airport has become damned near impossible, unless one has parked his or her own car there, which I did not. The pick-up location for all of the ride-hailing services such as Grab have been relocated to the parking garage at the far end of Terminal 3, rather than being along a lane in front of the departure area like every other normal airport in the world. As a consequence, unless one is willing to pay the extortion fares charged by the official “airport metered taxis,” or resort to the car-hire desk (which is where I ended up) at a rate five or six times what it ordinarily costs, one will be able to exit the airport and return home approximately never. As a Grab driver I spoke to on Friday explained, dropping passengers at the airport is no problem, but picking them up is loathsome and to be avoided at all costs, due to the new “system.”
The image NAIA gives the Philippines as a whole in the minds of visitors has been long-lamented, but incredibly, the new management of the airport has found a way to tunnel under that already low bar. Last week, Sen. Erwin Tulfo made an appeal for the reduction of domestic airfares to attract more travelers; I think one way that partial fare relief could be implemented would be for the government to tell NNIC to take its increased terminal fee at NAIA and shove it somewhere, until it demonstrates that it can actually provide passengers some value to justify it. As it stands now, everyone is paying more for an experience that is not just a downgrade from its already poor previous level, but an atrocity.
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Some additional context and insights, beginning with the name of the airport. Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was the exiled opposition figurehead in the time of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and who was famously assassinated at the airport about five minutes after his return to the country in August 1983. Just because that was a historically significant moment for the country (it would eventually lead to Marcos’ ouster, almost three years later) doesn’t mean that “let’s honor a political and cultural icon by naming the airport where he got smoked after him” was a good idea; to my mind, that probably brought some kind of curse to the place. Particularly in the somewhat ghoulish way that “honor” was expressed; for a while, there was a replica chalk outline of Aquino’s corpse in a little shrine inside Terminal 1 (the main international terminal) of the airport, and as far as I know, the spot on the apron outside Gate 11 where he got his head blown open still has a memorial plaque set in the pavement.
NNIC is part of the conglomerate controlled by uber-tycoon Ramon S. Ang; San Miguel Corporation’s core business is booze, but it’s also heavily involved in foods, energy, and infrastructure, among other things. A couple of years ago, I called out SMC for a shitty plan it had to build an elevated toll road above the Pasig River, which cuts through Metro Manila from east to west. That project was immediately targeted by protests by anyone in the city with half a brain in their heads; I did a little digging, and found out that the company had sort of fraudulently acquired environmental clearance. Thus, Mr. Ang (no relation to my adopted family who owns the paper I work for) and his entire organization pretty much despise me. I was savagely attacked after the piece on the expressway, and I expected to be after this one about the airport, but the reaction this time was surprisingly mild and indirect. In fact, the immediate reaction (which came the day after my column was published) was a self-congratulatory press release from SMC about how well construction of its New Manila International Airport north of the city is progressing. Then later in the week, Ang was on hand, along with President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., at NAIA to inaugurate a new digital immigration processing system in Terminal 3, something which is rather the least of the concerns about that shithole.
Apart from the new airport, which will probably not be operational for another 8 to 10 years anyway, there are only 3 substantial airports in the country that are privately operated: NAIA, the Cebu-Mactan International Airport, and Clark International Airport, the old US Clark Air Force Base on the outskirts of Angeles City in Pampanga, about 85 kilometers north of Manila. Cebu is a decent airport and seems well-run, and so is Clark; it is only NAIA, the only one run by an SMC subsidiary, that has problems. Ironically, the 44 government-owned airports run by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), while certainly not fancy, are clean, efficient, and pleasant to travel through.
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