TIEZA – Online Travel Tax Project buried

TIEZA on-line travel tax payment project has vanished.

About 18 months ago, on October 31, 2016 we wrote about the TIEZA Travel Tax Payment project. Today a comment from “Jun” reached us:

I checked the TIEZA website but I can’t find any option to pay online via credit/debit card. So I called their Travel tax unit and I was advised that they are still working on this. This article is misleading.

The last sentence is a bit stiff, isn’t it?
At the time we wrote above mentioned article, the TIEZA Travel Tax online payment system had been reachable from the Internet.  At that time we also wrote that the new system was not yet really usable. The customers needed at least a bachelor degree in computer science to get through the procedure.

If you call the travel tax payment page today, you are re-routed to an announcement page.

The menu …

… and this is what you get!

PR language translated:

The first paragraph just informs that they had finally done what they already should have done from the beginning: Let the airlines collect the tax. There are already so many taxes and fees in the flight ticket bills, that just the travel tax would disturb nobody.
They also write “you may still conveniently pay thru the travel tax centers in these airports”. Question for the PR manager: Had it really ever been convenient?

The second paragraph is just the famous “next year maybe” gate. Or do you think that 12 airlines invest big money in booking system modification and a year later they have to stop because the Philippines have now finished their programming work? This project has quietly died and has been buried between tons of paper. The cadaver can be found forever in the archives. A bit smelly, isn’t it?

[GARD]