[Karaoke_Queen]

A copy of a letter which I sent to Turkish Airlines and an ETA at the end in regards to their response to me.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to inform you of the incredibly poor experience my husband and I had on our recent Turkish Airlines flight. Both of us were looking forward to traveling on Turkish Airlines and both of us were left with bad tastes in our mouth.
On March 28th, we were scheduled on Flight 1972 from London to Istanbul and then, in the early hours of March 29th, from Istanbul to Tokyo on Flight 0052. As we arrived at Heathrow Airport, we received a notification that our flight was delayed and would not land until after our flight to Tokyo was to arrive.
We went to the help counter straight away and, after some considerable waiting in line (one person was being helped, despite there being 3 agents behind the counter), we were called up and were told that we could get on flight 1986 but that the gate was closing so we needed to hurry. At that point, the agent printed us boarding passes for the new flight, as well as our tickets for Flight 0052, which had the seat assignments that I had set 2 months earlier when I booked the flights. We were told to check our bags and get down to the gate.
We did make that flight and everything on that leg was fine.
When it came time to board our 2:00 am flight to Tokyo from Istanbul, the gate agent scanned my boarding pass, told me to have a good flight, and then stopped me, took my and my husband’s passports and boarding passes and told us to sit in chairs located behind the gate agents. There was no explanation as to what problem there was, or if we would, in fact, get on the flight for which we had boarding passes.
We ask several times what was happening and none of the 4 gate agents responded to us, instead just speaking to each other in Turkish. 2 in the morning comes and goes and I ask again what is going on. One of the female agents merely said “The gate isn’t closed yet”. This, despite it being after the scheduled departure time. Finally, we learn that our seats were sold to someone else, never mind that we had these seat assignments for 2 months and boarding passes with the same on them that had been printed by Turkish Airlines earlier in London.
Finally, the older, more senior gate agent informs us that there are 2 seats left on the aircraft. One in business and one in coach. My husband took the seat in business class as he is much taller than I am and I followed the gate agent to coach.
I was shown to the middle seat of the middle section of the back row of the aircraft. I had booked myself a window as I am a nervous and claustrophobic flyer who relies on being able to see out of the window to have a remotely comfortable flight.
The seat was incredibly narrow, and the pitch was absurdly small. The women on either side of me promptly fall asleep, which prevents me from comfortably asking them to allow me out so that I can have some room and walk around. The person in the seat in front of mine reclined shortly after take-off and the space between their seat and mine did not allow for my tray table to extend. I asked a flight attendant to please ask the passenger to restore their seat upright for meal times on this 12-hour flight and the flight attendant informed me that it was within that passengers right to recline, so they would not ask this of them. Instead of meals, I received an extra mini bag of crackers or nuts (I can’t remember which).
At one point, one of the women next to me woke up and I asked to get out. I attempted to see my husband in business class as I was very distraught. I was turned away and not allowed to enter business class.
By the time we landed, I was exhausted, nerves frayed, and I was ravenous. We went to get our luggage from baggage claim so that we could get me something to eat and so that we could get to the apartment at which we were staying so that I could sleep.
Our baggage is, of course, not there. The Star Alliance representative at Narita Airport was very kind, especially since she could see that I was on the brink of tears.
We received our luggage 36 hours after we landed and have submitted the forms for reimbursement for the purchases which we made. Despite instructing the luggage representatives online that a wire transfer was not an acceptable form of payment for us due to the fact that our bank charges us for wire transfers, it was sent that very way. I sent a message to complain because, again, we had instructed no wire transfer only to have it done and the response was basically, “Sorry. Not our problem.” Absolutely unacceptable.

Though I have tried, I cannot tell you how horrible almost our entire experience with Turkish Airlines was. I am requesting some form of reimbursement for what ended up being the absolute worst flight of my entire life.


ETA: Turkish Airlines responded to me today and told me that because of our flight being delayed out of London, we couldn’t have made it in time for our flight from Istanbul to Tokyo and, thus we actually didn’t leave for an entire day. This is terrifying. They don’t even know who is on their aircraft? Where their passengers are? They don’t know that they put us on an earlier flight to Istanbul so that we could make the Istanbul -Tokyo flight and that they issued the boarding passes for us? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?