TRYING to buttress its Ilocano market, Hawaiian Airlines is piloting a partnership with Cebu Pacific where incoming Hawaiians with Ilocano roots can directly transfer to a Laoag flight at the Manila international airport.

The Honolulu-based airline caters to a huge American market with Ilocano roots, many of whom can trace their ancestry to grandparents and great grandparents who worked the pineapple plantations of Hawaii. It also caters to immigrants or whose Ilocano-American relatives were petitioned to enter the US over the years.

The roundtrip Honolulu-Manila-Honolulu flight costs $399 or about P19,000. Interestingly, Hawaiian Airlines, which has four flights to Manila every week, still maintains the 70-pound (about 31.8 kilos) maximum baggage limit of Philippine air carriers. Other American airline companies have reduced their baggage limit to as little as 20 kilos.

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Did you know 1: The Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pag-asa) is coming up with a human comfort index for Filipinos or at what temperature and humidity Filipinos can best work and play  in (read: it can also be useful in reducing road rage).

Right now, Pag-asa gives out real-time advisories on temperatures and humidity on top of the usual weather reports.

On average, humans are most comfortably with temperatures of 70 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity of 18 percent to 77 percent.

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Did you know 2: Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes wants oil and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) players in Luzon to submit daily inventory reports to him as long as Executive Order (EO) 893 is in place.

As everybody knows, EO 893 rolls back the prices of oil and LPG prices to their October 15 levels.

Mind you, the Department of Energy doesn’t even seem to have a list of retail outlets for oil and LPG in Luzon, much less how much each outlet was charging on October 15. For this reason, Angie Reyes also wants the guys whose businesses are being squeezed to give him such a list.

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Did you know 3: Only less than 15 percent of the country’s business process outsourcing or BPOs actually disclose how much they’re making. Of that group, the top four (read: their 2008 revenues are pretty close to each other), are Teletech Customer Care Management Philippines Inc. with P8.1 billion; Convergys Philippines Services Corp, P8 billion; ETelecare Global Solutions Inc., P7.9 billion; and Sykes Asia Inc, P7.5 billion.

While most of the 400 or so other BPOs are small operations, there are also big ones like Accenture Ltd. and Citigroup Business Process Solutions, which keep mum about how much they make in the country.

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Did you know 4: Pateros, the only municipality in Metro Manila and its poorest with an annual income of P250 million, builds footbridges and small boats ideal for flooded areas.

Basically, the footbridges interconnect like a jigsaw puzzle and be easily installed during floodings, a necessity in a bedroom community where most of its residents work elsewhere in Metro Manila.

As everybody knows, Pateros is no longer in the balut and salted egg business. That’s been taken over by towns in Bulacan and Laguna.