TL;DR Never fly Turkish Airlines. Ever. Even if it is free. Because you will lose your money, be forced to pay for extra tickets and you will never get to your destination on time.
I LOST OVER USD $2000.00 TO THIS AIRLINE SOLELY BECAUSE OF THEIR INCOMPETENCE AND HOSTILE APPROACH TO CUSTOMER SERVICE. If I can just persuade a few people to fly with another carrier, I'll feel better.
They opened a huge new airport. It's a big mall that happens to have a few planes that land there.
My friends and I were casualties of the new airport. They were coming from the UK and I was coming from the US. TURKISH AIRLINES LOST MY FRIENDS' LUGGAGE BOTH COMING AND GOING, as well as them being delayed over 8 hours. Me, I lost $2000 in having to buy new tickets, get a hotel room, transportation fees, and meals, plus around 28 hours worth of flight delays.
Hope you like taxiing. You taxi for like 20-30 minutes after you land on the new runways. Keep that in mind if you have a connection. Also, there is no train or bus or whatever to take you around once you get in the airport. You have to walk everywhere.
No Wifi in the airport for me - they send a code to your phone number. If you don't have a Turkish telecom carrier/sim card/whatever, you're out of luck.
In my case, I couldn't check in to my flights. What happened was that Turkish airlines changed my flight which fell within a time window for transfers. Their rule was that if the transfer was less than 75 minutes, you can't connect your flight. Well no problem, I thought, I'll just rebook the next flight.
Not so fast.
Turkish Airlines customer service denied that there were any empty seats for the next flights UNTIL 24 HOURS later. That meant a 24 HOUR layover for me since out of the 6 flights in those 24 hours, there was not one single seat available?! I checked their flights and I could find empty seats, so I think they LIED TO ME.
It's generally the practice that on a layover over a certain time, you could get compensated with a hotel and meal vouchers. Well the meal voucher that they give is only for Burger King (Hungry Jacks in Australia), Sbarro, and KFC (I think - the third one was also a US fast food place).
I didn't get a meal voucher and I didn't get a hotel, thanks to the Turkish Airlines customer "service". Their policy in my experience was that "Turkish Airlines denies any wrongdoing and because you purchased an economy ticket, all of the blame is on you. Go figure out your own meal and your own accommodations." In my 3 interactions with them thus far in my trip, they wouldn't be persuaded that their flight schedule change and apparent inability to rebook me on a flight within 24 hours was my fault. They refused to take any ownership.
More than 24 hours later, I eventually got to my destination and was delayed by an hour, landing in the wee hours of the morning. Because of the wifi issue within the airport, I couldn't make hotel arrangements ahead of time or contact my friends.
On the way back, my flight was delayed by almost an hour and a half. I had a window to catch my next flight of two and a half hours and I thought that I'd be fine, but no, that didn't happen either.
The Turkish Airlines pilot MISSED THE RUNWAY.
He "executed" what he called a "missed approach". This delayed the flight landing by another 20 minutes as we circled for another approach.
I set foot in the airport just as my connecting flight had finalized boarding.
Again, I had to deal with Turkish Airlines customer service.
This time, I HAD TO BUY ANOTHER TICKET because clearly it was my fault that I did not show up on time for my connecting flight. I was a no-show given their policy, since I was held hostage on their massively delayed flight.
Their prevailing motto for their customer service is to deny deny deny and charge fees and require you to buy additional tickets, even if the airline or flight or technical issues was the fault of Turkish Airlines.
This is in contrast to European airlines and American-based airlines in my experience. Turkish Airlines seems to have a "deny, defend, and delay" policy to preserve their capital instead of helping their customers, at least their economy customers.
On the plus side, their in-flight experience was great except for a problem that I had with their media center on the international flight. The flight attendants were great.
Too bad that it's really hard for Turkish Airlines to live up to their scheduled flight times. Whatever their posted flight times, add at least an hour.
So look. PLEASE don't give them your money. YOU MAY HAVE TO BUY MORE THAN ONE TICKET TO GET WHERE YOU'RE GOING. You're not going to make it on time either.
This airline is simply not dependable and worse, is unrepentant in my experience. Turkish Airlines is customer hostile when it comes to rebooking and finding accommodations when they foul up their own schedules.
It will not go well for you. It cost me a lot of money and over a day of delays to learn this. read more