Recently I have flown with Turkish Airlines (THY) between Istanbul and Osaka, and here I want to share some of my observations and my overall flight experience.

First of all, I want to emphasise for all potential travelers that the THY has a completely different pricing strategy between Europe and the Far East Asia, which is simply great because they fly directly to Istanbul/Turkey from any major city in South East Asia and still their ticket prices were among the cheapest―while maintaining the class leading service (unfortunately in Europe, I think their pricing is rather too high for flights less than 5 hours).

The on-board catering is simply great and it is much better than any other airline that I have previously flown with (I had a very nice crab salad in my outbound flight from Osaka). Even the taste of the all-you-can-eat brownie is amazing! But this is not a new story; as far as I know it has always been that way (compared with BA, Air France or KLM- I think the greatest competition could be the Emirates). However, I cannot say the same thing with the on-board entertainment system, particularly when it comes to the selection of movies. This time around, I have experienced that the list was much more limited than my previous flights with them, around a year and a half ago. The most interesting title available was the Man from U.N.C.L.E which I chose to watch (and it was a very good movie). This domain should be improved significantly!

Online check-in is quite painless, but it was somewhat disappointing that I could not select one of the seats on the emergency exit from online check-in system. Whenever I can, I always want to fly in one of those seats because I am 192 cm and this particular location gives leg space comparable to the business class, which makes overhaul flights much more manageable for a tall person like me, someone who cannot afford to fly in the business class.

I was particularly frustrated with the ground service staff at the check-in counter in Istanbul Ataturk Airport (B counters), who put me into one of the regular seats despite having availability in this location (you only realise this after getting on-board the aircraft). Luckily, the on-board cabin crew was very professional and kind to change my seat in a place where I could fly comfortably for 13 hours. This seems to suggest that either the airport staff had a negative intention (honestly why should they?) or they are under-trained in terms of accurately addressing the special needs of customers (especially when it is quite easy to please them). Additionally my outbound flight TK 0046 on Jan 12^th 2016 at 1 AM was delayed more than an hour with absolutely no information given to the passengers which was extremely unprofessional.

I have also observed that the quality of the goods package and the flight magazine has fallen dramatically in a year and a half, which is quite disappointing. The previous time I had received a nice tin box with the map of the world inspired by the maps of Piri Reis (1465-1553), who is one of the leading admirals of the Ottoman Empire.

This time, nothing special.

I think of all the things the quality of the magazine deteriorated the most. For someone who follows a little bit of politics in Turkey, it is quite worrying to see that the THY magazine has more politics then it should and I think this direction will inevitably turn against the company, sooner or later. For comparison, I used to keep some of the parts from the on-board magazine, but the December 2015 and January 2016 issues were quite far away from that quality level.

Finally, I want to point out to something which I experienced for the first time and highly appreciated. In both of my flights one of the pilots were female and I thought this was such a significant move towards promoting gender equality at the workplace. I haven’t come across female pilots in other airlines and I thought this is really a significant move for THY.

Well done!! Two thumbs up!

Overall, flying with THY is still pleasing although there are a few issues to be addressed for continuous customer satisfaction! I hope this message will reach out to them and they will embrace that sincerely!