SEAMLESS, HASSLE-FREE travel experience – as much a blurb appropriated for the Clark International Airport as a matter of fact to Genesis Transport Services Inc., the company that pioneered the premium P2P – point-to-point – bus service at the airport in 2017.
A parallelism, indeed, a symbiosis in growth obtains between the CRK and Genesis. In 2003, passenger traffic commenced at the CRK with chartered flights via Asiana. In 2004, Genesis already established a shuttle service between CRK-NAIA – this, during the airport’s fledgling years, when flights were few and far between.
And there was no looking back for both since. Not even during the Covid-19 travel restrictions, albeit on the barest minimal operations. The new CRK terminal opened in May 2022, mainly to overseas Filipinos repatriated by the pandemic. Genesis buses – subjected to all health protocols – provided the way from the airport to home, hospitals, or the quarantine sites.
- Post-pandemic travel revenge bringing in more flights at CRK, Genesis ably serving increased passenger traffic, landside that is. At the nexus of it, Ms. Riza A. Moises, president and GM of Genesis.
Beyond P2P, Genesis operates three terminals in Metro Manila – Cubao, Avenida, and Pasay – with destinations in the provinces of Aurora, Bataan, Cavite, Nueva Ecija, and Pampanga, and Baguio City. Currently, it has a fleet of 600 buses with 150 more set to be delivered in 2024.
Genesis’ current stature as one of the 10 biggest bus companies in the Philippines belies its humblest beginning – in 1991 with all but five buses, readily ridiculed as “salagubang” (beetle) by the then well-established bus firms serving the Metro Manila-Central Luzon routes.
Small as it was and constrained to save time in transporting passengers from Manila to their provincial terminus, Genesis dispensed with the MacArthur Highway and used the North Luzon Expressway avoiding the requisite stops in Bulacan and Pampanga towns enroute to Bataan. There, aptly if unintentionally, the genesis of P2P.
How the salagubang has grown into a dragon in the transport industry – acquiring in 2010 Saulog Transit, the biggest bus firm in Luzon at Genesis’ inception, and in 2015 taking a slice of Dagupan Bus Co. it rebranded to North Genesis; even launching a premium carrier, JoyBus – bespeaks of the business acumen and executive leadership, aye, the hands-on entrepreneurship, of Ms. Moises who conceived, birthed, nurtured, grew, and still grows Genesis to even more flourish.
That Ms. Riza did not take even rudimentary units in a business course – she graduated with a mass communications degree from Maryknoll – makes the Genesis success story all the more impressive.
In fact, she recalls with much amusement now, how in a clan of topnotch lawyers and doctors she was always deemed “the least likely to succeed.”
“You really don’t know how God can touch your life. Just have faith,” Ms. Riza says. “And share the blessings that come your way.”
Her mother’s daughter, the once intrepid journalist and local paper publisher has truly become – Mrs. Leticia Angara-Moises was for a long time director of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Central Luzon, and retired as undersecretary.
Genesis established the Good Foundation in 2010 as its CSR arm. It is engaged in providing scholarship grants up to the tertiary level primarily to children of its employees.
At the time of the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, when mass dismissal of employees became management mode for companies to stay afloat, Genesis kept its workforce intact on rotation basis, and provided for their most basic needs.
“The pandemic afforded us greater time for introspection not only on company business but even on our inter-relationships. We engaged in values re-orientation sessions for management and rank-and-file and have since incorporated these in our corporate life,” she shared.
More of paying it forward than a payback is Genesis’s donations of buses to local government units where it operates. To date, Pampanga and Bataan had received two units each, Baler and Borongan, Samar with one each.
Niched as it is in central and northern Luzon, Genesis sees no expansion in the immediate future elsewhere.
“Our heart is well kept in Clark. Tremendous opportunities obtain here,” Ms. Moises said. “And New Clark City beckons.” The Editor
