[GBAIR72]

I am a Turkish miles and smiles gold. This is what happened We have had a nightmare with Turkish. They overbooked the flight from Istanbul to Cairo and offloaded most of my family. As I refused to fly as my family could not they told me I would be a no show and all
My subsequent flights would be cancelled . They then offloaded all of us. From a 7am flight to a 130am flight following day. One of my family members fainted from the stress and they offered no help. My elderly parents also stressed out. They didn’t care

I am disgusted by the behaviour of Turkish airlines. Tried to complain and it is falling on deaf ears at both Istanbul and Cairo. E mailed them and they have given me a standard response

Any help on what is the best way to get Turkish to compensate or at least take notice?

I will never fly them after this and moving my allegiance from Star back to OneWorld. No matter what people say about BA in all years I have flown never been treated in this way

[SimonS1]

My 84 year old Mum and Sister have been on Turkish from LGW to Cairo last 2 years.

Last year it was overbooked, put overnight in a hotel, they collected £500 each at LGW on return.

This year they left on Weds and my sister said they had flexibility in the schedule so could use the spending money. Next day a ding on my WhatsApp, delay from LGW, missed connection, collect €600 each and hotel overnight.

For business we don’t touch them. Far too unreliable and too many comments (whether true or not) about safety record too.

[capetonianm]

I have read here, and elsewhere, that TK are usually excellent until something goes wrong, and this does seem to be the case.

Splitting up a family, unless they accept being split and are compensated accordingly is an absolute no-no. We wouldn’t even split adult couples on the same PNR unless they accepted it. Very poor practice.

I don’t think your complaints will get anywhere unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time and money on pursuing it, and a friend of mine did so with a missed connection situation and still got nowhere with his complaint, just a series of standard replies and eventually silence.

I fear, but I’d like to be proved wrong, that you’ve answered your own question when you said : “I will never fly them after this.”

This and their allegedly unsafe practices are amongst the reasons I won’t fly them, despite their good business class fares between Europe and ZA.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Polly, openfly

[Otte]

I don’t know where you live,but a small claims court will be more than happy to slap TK.They just love those big corp that treat customers like trash.
The fact that you rightly didn’t want to separate from your family,and TK insists you will be a No Show,just shows how miserable their CS is.In the air they are ok,on the ground during irregular operations,God Forbid you will be at their mercy.
I myself spent a whole night on the floor at IST with my 4 yo son,cause all TK employees just disappeared.Why bother to be around and help.?
I can’t stress enough how HORROBLE TK is when things go wrong.
I would def go to court.They may settle with you to avoid showing up in court.
Good luck,teach them bastards a lesson.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Polly

[GBAIR72]

Thanks. I am going to give them a wide berth from now on

[GBAIR72]

Otte / capetonian thanks for your comments. I feel like I’m. Not the only one. . As you say in the air the service and food was great. Even when my brother in law fainted they just stood around like nothing had happened and didn’t help.

They have ruined a family reunion that took two years in the making.

I have asked them for senior contacts at Turkish and star alliance and they ignore me.

I might go to small claims and try emotional distress case.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Polly

[TominScotland]

GBAIR72

This sounds an awful experience. Just to check one detail – I take it that all of your family were booked on the one ticket and had the same PNR? If you were on a separate ticket to the rest of your family, this may explain (but not excuse) the action taken by Turkish.

[openfly]

Turkish….don’t do it, ever!

[Otte]

Give them hell.

[canucklad]

Hi GBAIR72
This must be one of the most popular recurring topics on this forum.
Yet to hear of a follow up comment that suggests that TK ever delivers a positive resolution.

My advice , unless you take Otte’s advice and pursue them through the courts, I’d recommended that you take your custom elsewhere and put it down to experience.
Ironically, TK in the air are excellent, but try and get them to resolve a problem , even a simple problem like was, and you’d be as well trying to teach a screeching parakeet to sing Silent night.

One piece of advice, If you are going to revert back to OneWorld , I’d do a bit of research and see if you can join a FFP that allows you to status match !

2 users thanked author for this post.

Polly, GBAIR72

[AMcWhirter]

TK is famed for poor handling of passenger complaints.

There have been a number of Forum threads regarding this issue. Here is the most recent.

businesstraveller.com/forums/topic/turkish-airlines-the-worst-customer-complaint-dept/

1 user thanked author for this post.

GBAIR72

[GBAIR72]

Canucklad thanks for you comments We were booked on two tickets as inbound I came in via London and family came in via Malaga so on two different PNRs. Still family that were split up ( ie my parents and sister and kids were on another PNR)

I am going back to BA as already BA Gold so rather that ( I was going let it lapse). For my business travel as I am the director and for staff travel I will now instigate a No fly policy on star alliance and make OW and U2 the preferred carriers . For my personal travel stick to OW

WHat Turkish don’t realise is the amount of business they are going to lose.

[Otte]

Well said .

1 user thanked author for this post.

GBAIR72

[SimonS1]

Frustrating, but unless you are spending millions on travel each year you could substitute ‘don’t care’ for ‘don’t realise’.

This I’m afraid is the nature of air travel these days. It has all been dumbed down, staffed by unskilled people who have no discretion to assist in any way.

Voting with your feet or cheque book is always the best idea, but the grass often isn’t greener. So good luck with BA, they are just as clueless as many threads on here will testify to. I believe they have just been ranked at the bottom end of the table by Which, next to Ryanair.

4 users thanked author for this post.

travelworld2, Polly, GBAIR72, capetonianm

[capetonianm]

This I’m afraid is the nature of air travel these days. It has all been dumbed down, staffed by unskilled people who have no discretion to assist in any way.

When I worked for airlines I was proud of my job, proud of my staff, and enjoyed the discretion we had to solve problems by thinking on our feet, using our knowledge of the industry and the systems we used, and actively engaging with customers to ensure their satisfaction and treating them fairly. An interesting point was that often when confronted with a customer who had been mishandled/inconvenienced, we knew what we could do to placate them. I would sometimes ask them what they would like and when it was less than we would have offered them, we were able to exceed their expectations and turn a screaming abusive threatening passenger into a purring pussy-cat! I enjoyed being customer-facing at times just to be able to achieve this. I learnt to think as if I were the person on the other side of the counter, and I trained my staff to do the same.

Sadly it then shifted to ‘computer says no’ but still some of us could override ‘no’ even if it meant re-issuing tickets and calculating fares manually, overriding system defaults to get the right seat, fare, or routing, and so on. Most of the unskilled and uncaring youngsters now have no clue how to do any of these things. We then got to the point where the systems were so dumbed down to ‘point and click’ screens with stupid little icons and drop-down menus that even those of us who knew the solutions couldn’t implement them. That was the point at which I hung my head in shame and left the industry, no longer wanting to be associated with it and having to apologise to customers for the inadequacies we faced daily.

Regrettably, all the major carriers have gone the same way.

I believe they (BA) have just been ranked at the bottom end of the table by Which, next to Ryanair.

I would be reluctant to compare BA with FR though, they are entirely different business patterns serving different markets. Different set of problems, different type of incompetence.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Polly

[Author]

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