Turkish Airlines Made Changing My Voucher Ticket Impossible and Charged €1000

We bought round-trip tickets for my wife for March 20 (Munich-Istanbul) and April 13 (Istanbul-Munich) using a €480 travel voucher we received, paying only €230. Due to an emergency, we needed to change these flights to a week later. However, this is where the nightmare with Turkish Airlines customer service began.

We called customer service four or five times. After nearly 45-minute conversations each time, they offered us an additional cost of around €1,000 to change the flights. If we had bought new tickets separately without making any changes, the price would have been €430. Can you believe it? A regular ticket costs €430, but customer service wanted us to pay €1,000 on top of the €230 we already paid for the same ticket. That’s almost €830 more! Look at the situation they put their customers in.

When we asked to cancel the ticket, they told us that since it was purchased with a travel voucher, it couldn’t be resolved through customer service or the app. Instead, we were told to submit feedback. So, we sent feedback—four times! After a week, one of the responses told us to do it through the app (despite the call center clearly stating it couldn’t be done via the app). Of course, we couldn’t cancel through the app because it was a travel voucher.

We wasted hours and days dealing with feedback forms, the app, and customer service—three different channels—while the flight prices increased and seats ran out. We couldn’t plan our trip at all. Did any of this matter to Turkish Airlines? My wife was a loyal Turkish Airlines customer and still has 24,000 miles—proof of how often she flew with them. And this is the treatment she received, all because of a travel voucher.

Turkish Airlines is a regret. We will never choose Turkish Airlines again when there are options like Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways.