Review of Philippine Airlines flight from Bangkok to Manila in Economy

【 Impractical and nonsensical 】

Hello and welcome to another Flight Report!

This is FR number 4 of this series. After spending a month in Thailand, it's time to leave the country… to New York! I've always wanted to fly transpacific, so this trip gave me the perfect opportunity. This FR will cover the first leg from Bangkok to Manila with the next one covering the 15-hour flight to the USA. 

Philippine Airlines is the flag carrier of the Philippines. The airline operates a fleet of 49 aircraft (as of January 2026) to destinations around Asia, North America, and Oceania. They used to fly to Europe (including London) but have since terminated all flights to the continent. As for price, I paid PHP23,122 ($392, €333) for a single flying BKK-MNL-JFK, which is a really good price considering the distance. For context, BKK to SFO/LAX was the same price, making JFK a no-brainer. Included with the price is seat selection and checked luggage.

I aim to offset all of my CO2 emissions from flights. All emissions are calculated using the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator and I will be funding projects approved by The Gold Standard.

【 Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport 】

The Airport Rail Link (ARL) station for the airport. The ARL is technically its own network, separate from the MRT/BTS/SRT lines in Bangkok, resulting in 4 separate metro networks. These networks all have separate ticketing systems and stations, requiring a fair amount of walking to change from one to the other. Yeah, it's pretty confusing and inconvenient. 

Anyway, using the ARL, it takes around 30 minutes to get from central Bangkok to the airport.

Walking past the arrivals floor. 

The check-in area. 

It's very, very crowded.

Check-in took less than 5 minutes with no queue (I arrived a bit after check-in opened). The agents were very kind in allowing me to short-check my bag to Manila as I had an overnight layover there. 

Security took 10 minutes and there's a nice sculpture of a dragon… or something. There's definitely some cultural background to it, but I have no idea what it is haha. 

There are a lot of duty-free stores around the terminal. 

With an hour still to boarding, let's head down a random branch. 

View of the apron with a Thai A330 that will be heading to Chennai (MAA). 

The terminal has a very weird design. It's two floors. There are two walkways on the top floor with the gates on the floor below.

The bottom floor with all the space isn't accessible until the gate is open. Honestly, this design makes no sense. There's all this space and they've decided to restrict all passengers to these two narrow walkways, making it very crowded. It might look nice, but it's not practical at all.

I guess this is the area for arrivals. Again, this design feels nonsensical to me. Like, why would you give arrivals so much more space and make all departing passengers squeeze into these narrow walkways? It's also really annoying if you end up on the wrong side since you have to walk for ages until you get to a 'bridge' that connects the two. I feel like it should be reversed - give departing passengers the lower floor with all the space and amenities and have arriving passengers use the two walkways on the upper floor. 

Another photo of the gates. It's not crowded now, but when there's a flight, this area is full of people sitting on the floor. Terrible design overall. 

Oh, and another thing, the airport announces whenever a flight is boarding, which is standard outside Europe… except Suvarnabhumi Airport does an announcement for every codeshare as well. So, for a more extreme example, imagine a Bangkok Airways flight to Phnom Penh (PG935), which has a ridiculous 15 codeshares (AF4387, AY6879, BA2194, EK4566, EY7708, GA9584, JL5959, KC1935, KL3721, LH4618, LX4186, LY8465, OS8597, QF3466, QR4393, TG7025, TK4531). You can see how announcing every one of those quickly becomes a problem. Admittedly, most flights won't have 15 codeshares, but it's still soooooo annoying to listen to an announcement for 5+ minutes for one flight. 

【 The fight 】

Flight time to Manila will 3 hours and 15 minutes and here's our route:

Boarding started 35 minutes late due to the late arrival of the inbound flight. 

The tray table. 

Legroom is pretty good for South/Southeast Asia standards. 

The crew also came around handing out blankets, which is nice.

View outside with a Thai A350 that will be heading to Delhi (DEL).

Pushback 20 minutes late with a nice view of the terminal. I do love the design/shape of the terminal building - it's pretty iconic, just a shame it's terribly designed inside.

View of the Satellite terminal (SAT-1). This is the newest part of Suvarnabhumi Airport, opened in September 2023. The airport also opened a new western runway (02L/20R) around the same time. 

Taxiing in front of the terminal is a China Eastern Airbus A320neo heading to Nanjing (NKG).

Takeoff! Bye bye Thailand, thanks for the awesome month. ;)

After departure, we did a 270° turn over Bangkok, giving us some amazing views of the city. 

With nothing to see outside, let's have a look at the contents of the seatback pocket. It includes:

- An air sickness bag…

- A safety card…

- And a guide on how to use the onboard streaming. 

And here it is. There's a very good selection of films/shows available.  A moving map is also available. 

I admit, screenshots are pretty annoying to include since they take up a lot of space… I had to zoom out my browser to 33% to see the top text and the screenshots at the same time haha. 

Around 90 minutes after takeoff, the crew came around with dinner. The options were fish or chicken, I went with the latter. 

And here it is. It is chicken with stir-fried noodles. Along with it came a bun with butter, a raspberry sponge cake, and a coriander-rice-noodle salad. The noodles look pretty plain, which is why I was soooooo surprised to find out it was really, really spicy. I'm pretty tolerant of spicy food, so it's not a huge problem for me. However, I have a huge problem with airlines giving out spicy food since a lot of people might not be able to eat it. I mean, if you're gonna do it, at least warn people about it! The thing is, I have no idea how it tastes (other than it's spicy as hell). I have a theory that restaurants (especially in China) add crazy amounts of spice so they don't have to worry whether their food tastes good or not… it may not be true, but that definitely works here!

Aside from the spicy chicken, the rest of the meal was great… apart from the coriander salad, which was disgusting. 

It took… quite a while… for my mouth to recover from that meal, and by then, we're already descending into Manila.

Welcome to the Philippines! We arrived 20 minutes late. 

【 Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport 】

Walking to immigration…

… which took 10 minutes with one of the happiest immigration agents I've come across. I don't know how that man stays so cheery at 11 pm, but I wanna know his secret. 

The baggage reclaim area - as mentioned in the intro, I asked to short-check my bag to Manila as I've got 20+ hours here before my flight to New York. 

The arrivals area landside. 

That's the end of this FR. The next one will pick up tomorrow, where I'll be doing the mammoth 15-hour flight across the Pacific and North America. Thanks for reading and I'll see you there! ;)

P.S. Check out my Bangkok tourism bonus below!! (Yes, I did edit all 300+ photos… it was long and painful, but it was worth it).