It’s 6.30 in the morning and as I crawl into bed I face my final quandary of the night The building manager has recently turned on the heating (it’s October) and apparently it doesn’t have a half setting. It’s a sauna. Outside on the other hand are the loudest birds I have ever encountered. There are so many of them that the city council has deployed bird scarers with whistles and red flags to get rid of them. Birdsong is nice but this is deafening, so I am faced with the choice of not being able to sleep due to noise or heat, and it seems an apt end to yet another frustrating Turkish Airlines experience.
When I got on the plane at 9pm the previous evening, I felt positive. There were 16 seats available on the flight and the check in lady had kindly blocked the one next to me, which earned her big bonus points. It was less commendable that she allowed me to check in at the business class counter and even tagged my bags as priority without having any idea whether I was entitled to the privileged. She looked very embarrassed when I asked her so I showed her my corporate card to ease the tension, but the point was proven that basically anyone can use business class check in if they have the audacity. Indeed I also used the business class airport entrance, which I wasn’t entitled to, but I obviously looked the part because a simple “yup” was enough to convince the entrance lady that I was in fact supposed to be there.
Istanbul airport is a disgrace. There are massive queues at the entrance, check in, immigration, and security so you better leave a good hour to get through, especially if you’re travelling on a Sunday night like I was (although I managed to skip two of the queues by blagging). It’s interesting to note that Elite card holders can also skip the immigration queues, which isn’t the case everywhere.
The famous Turkish airlines lounge is a great gimmick (I have a lounge access card from my work). They boast Scaelectrix, free 5 minute massages, virtual golf, Skype corner, cinema, pool table, etc. The Scalectrix cars never work and the staff seem to hate their job of collecting the cars that spin off, but woe betide anyone who tries to do it themselves. The virtual golf is confusing but fun for about 5 minutes. The cinema plays the same three live music DVDs and is disgusting (see photo), and the Skype doesn’t work. There are no chargers by the seats and, despite being called a business lounge, no place to work.
I have been to the lounge over ten times and only seen a free massage person once, and I didn’t mange to catch her. The lounge entrance is a catastrophe because they are understaffed. The barcode entrance scanners don’t work so at least one person is permanently engaged helping people to enter the lounge whilst three others work tirelessly helping passengers. The unlucky trio are the only Turkish airlines representatives in that part of the airport so they end up dealing with a whole host of issues, most of which are not related to lounge access. There is no queueing system so it becomes a maul and if you are unlucky enough to get stuck behind someone with a complex issue (changing flight, for example), then you could be there for ten minutes whilst 8 people pass through the queue next to you. Should you decide to swap queues, you may be jumping right behind someone else with a complex concern – it’s a gamble. The staff there never, repeat never, bother to look at who’s been waiting long and guide them to an available counter. We’re not on the plane yet.
So I get the to gate nice and early but board late (a personal tactic, see previous blog post on how to get the best seat on a plane). As I get to the plane there is a huge pile of about 30 bags.
It’s official; Turkish airways don’t give a shit how many carry on bags you have. I saw one family of 5 with 4 bags each. Well, not so much bags as big parcels wrapped up with tape. 20 between them. They struggled them through security, to the gate and down the air bridge where they had the audacity to ask me to help carry them down. Turkish airways then collect all excess baggage from passengers at the airplane entrance and put them into the hold free of charge. I reckon there must have been a ton of luggage there which poses, first and foremost, a safety issue. When the pilots do their weights and baggage calculations they estimate 20 odd kg per person and they don’t factor in a ton of extra weight. Now apparently they additionally have scales on each undercarriage so they can get the actual weight in real time, more on that later. Equally frustrating though, Turkish Airways have a loyalty program called Miles & Smiles which gives you an increased baggage allowance as you move up the membership levels. What’s the point when they don’t bother limiting the carry on? First time fliers can take 100kg no problem. The staff told me that there’s nothing that they can do about it (I can think of something) and that their bosses have told them to deal with it by taking the bags away at the door. He told me that yesterday they took 150 pieces from a single flight. Rules and rules, peeps, enforce them!
Which brings me into the plane. There are international laws which require all cabins to be “clean” during take off and landing. As unimportant as it sometimes seems, the cabin crew have a responsibility to ensure that all window blinds are open, tables are stowed, and seat backs are in the upright position (sound familiar?). Apparently Turkish haven’t got that memo. On my last flight I could see 5 seats in my immediate vicinity that were reclined for take off and landing. Three separate staff talked to the guy directly in front of me before take off and didn’t notice (or didn’t care) that his seat was not upright. On my previous flight it was similar plus the guy right next to me never did up his seat belt, because he wasn’t asked to. He also moved into business class for landing so he could get off quicker and they didn’t care. But perhaps the worst thing is that the seatbelt signs are ignored by the staff on Turkish. On every flight I have been on recently people go the toilet as soon as the cabin crew stand up (seat belt signs still on) and the cabin crew don’t say anything. After a few hours we had some quite heavy turbulence and by this point the seat belt signs were off. It lasted for a few minutes and I was thinking “when are they going to turn on the seatbelt signs?”, which eventually they did after about 2 or 3 minutes but they then left them on for at least the next hour. In fact I didn’t see them turned off for the rest of the flight but I fell asleep for a bit. Shortly after the turbulence, when in my opinion the seatbelt signs should have been turned off, people started going to the toilet. After about half an our of this blatant rule violation I asked the cabin crew why people were allowed to go the bathroom when the seatbelt signs were on and she told me “it’s OK because there’s no turbulence anymore”. I’m pretty sure that the pilots are supposed to make that call but on Turkish Aiways it seems that both the pilots and the cabin crew have given up on the international system of seatbelt signs. Being overweight or passengers walking around during turbulence are serious safety issues but the even more worrying question for me is when staff (and airlines) are not able to follow simple safety procedures, what else do they miss?
So the guy in front of me had his seat back the whole way so I could barely see my screen. After take off I decided to put my seat back half way, not to be a pisstaker for the lady behind me, but as soon as I did I got a tap on the shoulder. I turned around braced for a fight, prepared to explain that the guy in front of me was a joker and I was in fact being a decent chap by only going back half way. As luck would have it, however, I was sat in front of the only person on the flight in a neck-brace. “Sorry I’ve got an injured neck so could you please put your seat forward”. What could I say? So there I was, seat up, head down, so I gave up on watching TV so I decided to try to catch some vertical Zs. The rest of the flight was uneventful.
There are a few videos on youtube of Dushanbe airport on a bad day when the arrivals hall turns into a brawl. It can take well over an hour to pass immigration if there are many flights landing (more than 1) and so I decided to pay for the $30 CIP treatment in order to skip the mess. The flight lands at 4am so its the difference between being home at 5 or 6.30 am. I sat in the nice reception room and declined tea or coffee erroneously thinking that I would be back in bed pretty soon but my bags did not materialise. After half an hour I went to find the bags myself and watched bag after bag spitting out of their semi-automated baggage reclaim belts. It stops the incoming flow when there is a bag on the belt but every now and then it thinks “fuck it” and sends one out anyway knocking other bags onto the floor so one of the staff has to jump over and clean them up every 5 minutes or so. An hour in and my bags haven’t shown so the staff start to make enquiries. It turns out that my bag along with about 14 others has been “offloaded” in Istanbul. The guy shows me an email from Istanbul which clearly shows which bags have been “offloaded”. It doesn’t say “forgotten” or “misplaced”, they have been “offloaded”. I have no idea why they were offloaded but my best guess goes like this. The pilots weren’t expecting the ton of extra baggage which these rule breaking pisstakers thought it was fine to bring along so the plane became overloaded, as they could see from their landing carriage scales, so they ordered the removal of 15 bags. Rather than offloading the excess baggage of the rats, they took off the closest 15 bags to hand, which included mine. There was even a note next to mine saying priority, based on the tag that the check in lady had given me without knowing if I was actually entitled to it, but apparently that wasn’t enough to save me. There are only 3 flights to Dushanbe per week so my bag will arrive in 3 days and by that time I’ll be up country so I won’t see my bag for about a week.
Although this post might strike you as extensive, it is far from comprehensive. I could mention the following issues, but I don’t like to moan 🙂
- Lounge wifi non existent
- Contact information on website wrong
- Someone stood up for the entire taxi to terminal and cabin crew said nothing
- Guy talking on phone during safety video and on route to runway but staff said nothing. Another women received a call before landing but the staff didn’t see to be fair.
- Call centre said I could change flight FOC until exact departure time but when I checked back 1.5 hour before departure they said it was too late because it was now under responsibility of airport so I had to pay no-show fee.
- No Miles and Smiles office at Istanbul airport despite being the Airport’s hub
- No last minute upgrade options at the airport like many airlines offer
- Website won’t allow you to login with email unless you have specifically set that option in the system but it doesn’t say that on the login page so you end up trying multiple times to log in with email and eventually having to reset your password.
So as I lie here listening to the birds chirping (anything not to be to hot) I realise the accuracy of their new safety video. If by “party” they mean everyone breaking the rules and doing what they want, then it really is a party in the Sky with Turkish airlines :)))))
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