For decades, fixing NAIA was almost a national punchline. Administration after administration touted rehabilitation plans, terminals broke down anyway, and passengers suffered everything from power outages and busted baggage systems to tanim-bala.

Now, serious money is finally being poured into its make-over. 

By its first anniversary, New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) had already spent around P3.5 billion on upgrading the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, part of a much larger five-year, P72-billion rehabilitation program.

Rappler recently went inside Terminal 3 with NNIC officials and former transportation secretary Jaime Bautista to see what billions of pesos — and nearly two years of private management — have actually changed.

Welcome to the Philippines

Start at arrivals, where a new commercially important passenger or CIP lounge sits near the VIP parking area. The lounge, with its posh interiors and conference rooms, was finished in time for the Philippines’ packed year as ASEAN chair, which has brought a steady stream of foreign ministers, finance officials, diplomats, and heads of government through the country for high-level meetings and summits.

By next year, NNIC is looking to further develop the leftmost side of Terminal 3 as a hub for all public utility vehicles like buses and taxis to use. It’s also where the Metro Manila Subway will eventually connect to the airport, though that’s likely years down the line.

Move deeper into the terminal and formerly boarded-up spaces have been brought back to life. There’s an activity center, meeting rooms, and a food court — with, fittingly, a San Miguel bar.

Head one level higher and you’ll see familiar restaurants and cafés such as Estrel’s, Chili’s, UCC, and Nanyang.

While NNIC’s renovation moved with impressive speed, some of these were quick wins. NNIC officials told Rappler that the foundation of what now looks like a new mall in the airport was there all along, just unused and undeveloped.

“It was really a commercial plan, pero hindi lang naayos (it just wasn’t fixed),” an NNIC official told Rappler.

Even some escalators leading into these spaces had already been installed years ago, officials said. The areas around them were simply boarded up and eventually used for storage.

Renovating NAIA involved a little airport archaelogy too. NNIC officials said proper “as-built” plans were sometimes incomplete or missing altogether. Contractors would open a wall or floor only to suddenly find an unexpected pipe in the way.

Check yourself in

At the Level 3 departure hall, there’s now a Dignitaries Lounge, while OFWs have their own pre-departure lounge nearby offering complimentary meals.

But before getting airside, passengers will encounter some of NNIC’s less Instagrammable, but arguably more important, upgrades.

Terminal 3 now has around 40 self-check-in kiosks, alongside automated bag-drop facilities, allowing passengers on participating airlines to print their own boarding passes and baggage tags without waiting for a staffed counter to open.

That is especially useful in the Philippines, where travelers have a tendency to arrive very, very early.

“The Philippines has the earliest show-up profile in the world,” an NNIC official said. “Meaning, passengers come here very early, which is what most airlines like. Ang problema, the airlines only open three or four hours before. So nag-aantay ‘yung mga pasahero (The problem is airlines only open three or four hours before, so passengers are left waiting).”

From there, passengers scan their boarding passes at automated reconciliation gates before proceeding to security and immigration.

NNIC officials said the company spent nearly P1 billion on immigration-related automation, including 78 biometric e-gates and around 130 visa and document examination systems.

“The government asked us for an SLA [service level agreement] of 10 minutes per passenger,” an official said. “The average processing time is 16 seconds.”

For now, however, not everybody gets the 16-second treatment. Use of the automated immigration gates remains limited to OFWs and foreigners for departure, and Filipinos and OFWs for arrival.

NNIC officials told Rappler that they’ve asked the Bureau of Immigration to widen that to everyone, but they’ve received pushback due to human trafficking concerns.

Time to unwind

Clear immigration, and the upgrades become considerably more indulgent.

Up on Level 4, business-class and other eligible premium passengers can retreat to First Meridian, a sprawling new lounge complete with a golf simulator, wine cellar, buffet, private dining rooms, and quiet areas overlooking the airside.

And if a lounge isn’t your cup of coffee, there’s a Starbucks Reserve opposite First Meridian, serving specialty brews and Philippine-themed merchandise. 

The problem with fixing NAIA is that NAIA never stops being NAIA. An endless throng of passengers still hurries along the corriders with flights to catch. Airlines still have schedules to keep. Immigration queues still snake along. 

“It’s so difficult to be constructing and operating at the same time,” an NNIC official said. “So we only work during lull times.”

NAIA is already carrying far more passengers than it was built for. The airport was designed to accommodate roughly 35 million passengers a year. In 2025, it handled around 52 million. Terminal 3 alone was designed for about 14 million passengers but handled roughly 27 million.

To do that, it’s trying to squeeze more out of NAIA’s two runways.

One step was removing most turboprop operations from the airport. A turboprop may carry only around 70 passengers while occupying a runway slot that could be used by a jet carrying several hundred. Mixing turboprops and jets can also require greater aircraft separation because of wake turbulence. 

NNIC estimates NAIA can now handle around 40 to 42 aircraft movements per hour, up from roughly 38. Its eventual target is 48.

NAIA: Government’s new money-maker

NNIC officials say around P78 billion has already been remitted to government as of July 2026, including the consortium’s P30-billion upfront payment.

For government, privatizing NAIA is also proving more lucrative than operating the airport itself. In 2023, the last full year before privatization, the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) remitted P8.17 billion to the National Government through dividends, taxes, the government’s share of airport income, and other statutory payments.

Under the new concession, the Department of Finance estimates government could collect roughly P900 billion over 25 years, or about P36 billion a year on average, while NNIC shoulders the cost of operating and modernizing the airport.

That hefty contribution traces back to the bid that won San Miguel’s group the airport concession in the first place. NNIC offered government 82.16% of gross revenues, excluding passenger service charges, far above the 33.3% offered by the GMR Airports Consortium and 25.91% from the Manila International Airport Consortium. (READ: NAIA rehab: Consortium led by San Miguel, Incheon Airport outbids everyone)

For another sense of how lucrative NAIA has become for government, the Manila International Airport Authority’s latest remittance hit P7.59 billion in dividends from its 2025 earnings, higher than the P5.67 billion paid by gambling regulator PAGCOR.

Terminal reassignments and NAIA’s future

And there are bigger changes still ahead.

Most of the visible upgrades so far have been concentrated in Terminal 3, partly because NNIC eventually wants it to become one of NAIA’s two international terminals.

NNIC officials told Rappler that Philippine Airlines could move both its international and domestic flights to Terminal 3 as early as February 2027, consolidating there temporarily while more work is completed.

Here’s the long-term plan, though this is very much on the drawing board:

• Terminal 1 will handle international flights from low-cost carriers, led by Cebu Pacific
• Terminal 2 will handle domestic Cebu Pacific and AirAsia flights
• Terminal 3 will handle full-service international flights, led by Philippine Airlines
• Terminal 5, which will rise on the former Philippine Village Hotel site, will handle PAL’s domestic flights

Under its concession agreement, NNIC is required to expand the airport’s capacity to as much as 62 million passengers annually.

If Ramon Ang is able to pull this off, it would be a dramatic turnaround for an airport with a troubled history. (READ: Ramon Ang wants an even bigger NAIA terminal than promised. Can he deliver?)

NAIA, long derided as one of the world’s worst airports, became notorious for tanim-bala, bedbugs, failing baggage systems, broken air-conditioning, and repeated power interruptions. On January 1, 2023, a failure in the country’s air traffic management system effectively shut Philippine airspace for hours, disrupting hundreds of flights and affecting tens of thousands of passengers.

For years, successive administrations tried and failed to rehabilitate or privatize NAIA. The breakthrough finally came in 2024, when the Department of Transportation under then-secretary Jaime Bautista awarded the concession to the San Miguel-led consortium.

Bautista, now an independent director of San Miguel Corporation, told Rappler he was “very happy” to see how much had changed. But even he acknowledged that there’s much still left to do. Terminal 5 still has to be built, the terminals still have to be reshuffled, and all of it has to happen while NAIA remains open, crowded, and very much in use. – Rappler.com