Seven years on, Iloilo’s Airport is still waiting for a plan

Count the years. Prime Asset Ventures, Inc. — the Villar group’s holding firm — first filed its unsolicited proposal to rehabilitate and expand the Iloilo International Airport in 2019. Negotiations with the government wrapped up, successfully, in late 2024. Then this April, the Department of Transportation rejected the PHP 21-billion proposal outright. The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines said it lacked an endorsement to the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development, a requirement for any project above PHP 15 billion. The proposal is off the Public-Private Partnership Center’s list. We are, more or less, back at 2019.

Now the Department of Transportation is “seriously considering solicited mode,” Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines Deputy Director-General Danjun Lucas told BusinessWorld — meaning the government would define the project itself and open it to competitive bidding instead of negotiating with one proponent. On paper, that is not a bad idea. A clean, contested bid can produce better terms than a single-firm arrangement built around original proponent status, where the incumbent holds the right to match. If the rejection forces real competition, Iloilo could come out ahead.

But notice what the “solicited” pivot actually is: a decision to start over. And starting over has a cost that nobody at the Department of Transportation seems eager to name.

Here is the part that should bother anyone who has stood in that terminal on a Friday afternoon. The Iloilo airport was designed for 1.2 million passengers a year. In 2024 it handled 2.79 million — more than double its capacity, a nearly 20-percent jump from the year before. It is the country’s fifth-busiest airport, the gateway for a region that drew 5.9 million tourists last year and sends thousands of overseas workers through those gates. The congestion is not just a forecast but a daily experience of every Ilonggo who flies.

Against that, the government’s commitment has been thin. A PHP 190-million tranche from the 2024 budget paid for repairs — added seats, fixed escalators, a dropped redundant security check. Useful, modest, and nowhere near a PHP 21-billion expansion. A separate PHP 645 million was parked in the 2025 program. For 2026, no dedicated allocation for the Iloilo airport has surfaced. So the project now depends entirely on a private partner — through a bidding process that has not started, under a procurement mode the Department of Transportation has only said it is “considering.”

That is the gap. Officials keep calling Iloilo a “major gateway.” A major gateway does not get run on stopgap repairs and a maybe.

Two things would help, and neither is exotic. First, the Department of Transportation should commit to a dated timeline for the solicited bid — terms of reference, procurement, award — and publish it. “Seriously considering” is not a schedule. Second, before anything is locked in, Iloilo’s business groups and local officials should press for the terms that protect passengers: clear service standards and limits on what fees travelers will absorb.

The terminal has been over capacity since before the pandemic. Iloilo has waited seven years for a plan. It can reasonably ask not to wait for an eighth.