Blueprint or blank check?

The Iloilo airport terminal in Cabatuan was designed for roughly 1.2 million passengers a year. The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) counted 3,101,280 through it in 2025, up 11.25 percent from the year before, across 22,410 aircraft movements. Nearly triple the design load, in the same floor area that opened in 2007.

Now the paperwork. Prime Asset Ventures Inc. (PAVI) filed an unsolicited proposal in 2019 — PHP 21.16 billion, operate-and-transfer, with the Department of Transportation (DOTr) and CAAP as implementing agencies. It received original proponent status. Negotiations wrapped up in September 2024 without an agreement, and the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Center has now confirmed that the proposal is complete. Six years, and the Swiss challenge that was supposed to test that offer against the market never happened. No rival ever had to be beaten, because no rival was ever invited in.

What the region got in the meantime is PHP 190.45 million in appropriations-funded repairs: terminal refurbishment, chillers, apron and runway work. Under one percent of the value of the proposal that was sitting in the slot. Those repairs will raise peak-hour terminal capacity to 675 domestic and 407 international passengers, which is useful and nowhere near enough.

To be fair, the collapse was not a scandal. The Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPDev) must sign off on anything above PHP 15 billion, and it declined to. The threshold did exactly what the PPP Code intended. The problem is the clock. A screen that fires only after five years of negotiation belongs at the acceptance stage, not the endorsement stage. And the DOTr’s now-leaning-toward-a-solicited-bid approach is the right call, rather than an admission of failure. Worth saying plainly.

Where the official framing needs pushing back on is the word “blueprint”. The PPP Center describes the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) and the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA) as “two very successful airport PPPs.” Successful by which measure? NAIA raised its passenger service charge on September 14, 2025, to PHP 950 for international departures and PHP 390 for domestic. Ilonggos have been paying PHP 900 and PHP 350 since April 21, 2025, under CAAP Memorandum Circular 019-2025 — the international fee collected in cash at the gate, which is its own small indignity. We are already within PHP 50 of Manila, for a terminal running at triple its design capacity. So the useful question is not whether a concession will raise fees. It is what level of service a concession will contractually guarantee at the prices Ilonggos are paying right now.

MCIA deserves the same scrutiny. Aboitiz InfraCapital took out the GMR-Megawide stake in late 2024, well inside a 25-year term. That may be unremarkable corporate housekeeping. It still ought to be explained rather than waved at.

Three things would help before bidding starts. Name the three airports going to competitive bidding this year, because priority and long overdue are free to say and cost nothing to walk back. Publish the terms on which the PAVI talks broke down, since a failed negotiation over a public asset is not proprietary information. And give the Regional Development Council and the province a documented seat while concession terms are drafted — route commitments, cargo handling, fee ceilings — because after award those terms are locked for a quarter century.

The queue has been keeping count since 2019.