I’ve been on a kick lately with Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles. With an extremely attractive award chart for flights within the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, they are one of the best options on the table for domestic flights. You can even book a limited number of flights online! And when that fails, you can call them up.
Besides my first interaction over the phone, all the Turkish agents I’ve spoken to have been decent to good. It’s not a fantastic experience, like working with a Virgin Atlantic agent, but it’s less painful than some other agents I’ve had to deal with *cough Avianca cough*.
But after booking a Hawaii sweet spot flight for me, one agent left me a bit quizzical about her truthfulness.
Can You Book Another Ticket For Me?
After finalizing all the details (Turkish agents are very good about getting your name exact, reading off fare rules, etc), and working through both fee payment and miles payment transactions, the Turkish agent helpfully asked, “is there anything else I can do for you?” Why, yes, actually. I thanked her, and asked her if she could help me book a second award ticket.
The resignation in her voice was palpable. I got a quiet, “yes, I can do that.” But it was obvious that she was not interested in working through another booking. All of a sudden the call went from fine, to super awkward. I fed her the origin and destination. It was pulled up at United.com, and everything showed X-class space. Things should be good.
Maybe 15 seconds after I gave her the info, she softly said, “there are no flights.” This was much less than the time she had taken to find the previous flights.
Gotta Pull the Ol’ HUCA
It was at that point that I suspected that she was lying to me about the results, just to get me off the line. She had easily found the last ones, and this itinerary wasn’t a whole lot different. Just a different destination.
I decided it wasn’t worth trying to feed the segments to her to help me, if she indeed hadn’t bothered to actually key in anything. I’d hang up and call again later and get someone else to do the next booking. Fortunately, Turkish Airlines hold times aren’t bad at all, typically 1-3 minutes, in my experience.
What do you think? Was she lying to me? Have you ever had an agent do something similar?
Hi, so I was reading some old articles about booking partner flights thru Turkish miles and it had been said that while you can reserve over the phone/email you actually have to be ticketed at a Turkish Airline ticket office. Is this no longer the case? Thanks!
Nope! Can easily do it over the phone, and some even online.
As a family oriented blog, I just want to point out that the proper use of the word fly should be “flies” as in Family Flies Free…seeing your title in my feed is like nails on a chalkboard. I hope we are not setting bad examples to children.
It’s a purposeful choice, Steve, for various reasons that I will spare you. Trust me that I am teaching my kids proper spelling.