Flying Turkish Airlines from Brussels to Africa in Business

[rix]

Hello,

In case of interest, I have posted about my recent trip with TK to Niamey on my blog, covering the following topics:

- Brussels Airlines lounge at Brussels Airport
- Brussels-Istanbul flights return
- Istanbul-Niamey flights return
- Turkish Airlines CIP lounge at Istanbul airport
- TourIstanbul complimentary Istanbul tour between connecting flights

http://www.onfoodandtravel.com/2013/02/ ... ssels.html

The pros of flying to West Africa with TK in a nutshell:

- Significant price difference (in my case 1,500 EUR cheaper than Air France)
- Excellent lounge at Istanbul airport
- Pretty good food
- Check-in of luggage directly at Brussels Airport
- One gets to avoid Air France and/or Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. In other words, no savage strikes!
- Their modern fleet except * below

And the cons:

- Service level of Turkish Airlines crew - most were unsympathetic and service was inconsistent. Some were obviously uncomfortable speaking English. They seriously need to improve recruitment and training standards!
- Flying eastwards to Istanbul then backtracking to West Africa does add some extra hours to one's journey
- Mentality - before take-off Turkish "friends" of the crew get upgraded to business class, while some hopeful others were trying to become "friends". Perhaps the airline has obviously grown too fast without an accompanying cultural change
- The seats on the African flights do not become flat enough for such flight durations
- On-board beverage selection, especially on the Africa flights. And there are much better welcome drinks than super sweet lemonades and strawberry flavored syrups...
- Having to use Brussels Airlines' lounge in Brussels (compared to the one in IST)
- TourIstanbul - this should have been above among the advantages, but turned out to be a waste of my time
- No miles were credited and since the Miles& More web site did not recognize NIM among the airports, I had to send several e-mails and mail all by boarding passes and tickets to Germany. It took 1,5 month to get the miles
- * The dirty and old aircraft on my flight back to Brussels

[Inquirer]

Nice and very detailed report!

I had exactly the same experience on Turkish: they have the most varying performance you can imagine: I flew out to IST on an A330 and got the service you'd normally expect on intercontinental flights only: return flight was on on a 737 and at some point I thought I was actually flying one of the sluggish turkish charter companies, despite being in biz class!

It's one thing constantly buying more planes and opening new routes every month while you spend the rest of your money on soccer teams in order to pretend you are just like any other true network carrier, but it's something completely different to actually match the consistently flawless service levels from carriers like Lufthansa or Swiss, I can tell you!

[sn26567]

Nice report. Just one detail: did you have to stay on board in Ouagadougou, or were you allowed to disembark (to a lounge?) ?

I had better experiences between BRU and IST in C class in the past...

Too fast growth may indeed be the reason.

[eurojet]

I used to love them, but they have indeed become very inconsistent in their service and their prices have risen considerably as well. Additionally, IST is just becoming a hell of an airport, also becoming very tricky when having tight connections. For my Central Asian trips, I'd shifted to Ukraine International, LH and OS. Turkish starts next month from Lux as well, but poor timings and only 4 times a week

[rix]

Nice report. Just one detail: did you have to stay on board in Ouagadougou, or were you allowed to disembark (to a lounge?) ?

We had to stay on board, which explains why there was no proper cleaning (the Burkinabe cleaners just picked trash easily reachable from the aisle). That was an interesting stop, especially being in business class and observing FAs filling airsick bags with liquor before ending their shift, perhaps for the road

[Darjeeling]

I could recently chat with a TK Africa salesman. If I take Kinshasa as an example, they typically transport pax out of FIH to:

- BEY
- TLV
- CAN and PEK
- BOM
- BRU and CDG but this is low yield traffic for them (they've had some very aggressive fares recently on those two new destinations).

Their average load on the 739ER is 100 to 120 pax which is well within their forecasts.

[b720]

ET must feel the heat on those routes!

[Comet]

They sound like the kind of airline I would not want to fly with!

Again, no welcome from the crew when I entered the plane. Since the plane still had passengers for Ouagadougou, there was no cleaning before the Istanbul bound passengers boarded, not even a cursory removal of trash

Reminds me of the time I boarded an Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Honolulu - I shared my seat with a pile of cigarette ends - Air New Zealand was another airline that won awards and was raved about, but in my opinion they did not deserve any of it.