Royal Air Philippines liquidation: Global airline cancels all flights amid financial woes - despite thousands of passengers with bookings
A global airline has cancelled all of its flights as it has gone bust.
Royal Air Philippines has officially ceased operations and has cancelled all of its flights as a result. The Manila-based charter Royal Air Philippines more commonly referred to as Royal Air received licensing to run commercial flights in 2017 and quickly expanded to international destinations like Cambodia, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Royal Air was founded in 2002. Its parent company is the Lancang–Mekong Group, backed by Chinese private enterprises and non-state capital. The airline initially focused on charter services before transitioning to a low-cost carrier model.
Although Royal Air showed signs of recovery in 2023 and 2024, carrying 100,000 and 116,000 international passengers respectively, the momentum did not continue into 2025. In the first nine months of last year, the airline transported only 51,800 international passengers.
On 4 January the airline confirmed that it was canceling all of its commercial flights. This left between 3,000 and 4,000 travelers with tickets booked between until March 2026 having to seek out alternative travel options.
According to The Street, the airline currently states that it is looking forward to “welcoming you aboard soon”, however, a long string of recorded financial challenges makes any scenario other than a total shutdown increasingly unlikely. While we might still see the planes flying, they would most likely be all-cargo or chartered passenger flights.