Zest Airways
Zest Airways Logo
Zest Airways is an airline that started out as Asian Spirit based in Pasay City, Manila in the Philippines. In its original form as Asian Spirit it began in September 1995 by three friends who contributed $1 million each to start up the Airline Employees Cooperative. The three friends invited 36 of their friends, mostly Philippine Airlines employees to run Asian Spirit as a salary-to-equity swap deal. Beginning in 1996 Asian Spirit started operations with only two second hand Dash 7 aircraft servicing a commercial route with two flights a day from Manila to Malay serving the resort town of Boracay, making it the first scheduled airline to serve that town. Later on that year it introduced new routes to secondary airports. In 1997 it switched from a cooperative company to a corporate set up as Asian Spirit Inc. In 2008 Asian Spirit was sold to AMY Holdings, company controlled by Alfredo M. Yao. After taking over Yao expressed interest in merging Asian Spirit with South East Asian Airlines but the deal didn’t go through. In September of 2008 Asian Spirit officially became Zest Airways. The possible name change could reflect the allusion to the flagship business of AMY Holdings juice maker Zest-O. (Source: Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia)
Currently Zest Air operates 7 aircraft, two Airbus A320’s with the capacity of carrying 162 passengers each, and five MA 60 regional turboprop aircraft with the capacity of 52 passengers per aircraft. Zest Air now flies to 18 Philippine destinations and will eventually expand to international flights in Southeast Asia. For more information on Zest Airways such as schedules, destinations and prices please visit their website Zest Airways.
