Turkish Airlines Customer Service
During our trip to Azerbaijan, Derrick and I were lucky to run into a manager for Turkish's email customer service team. It turns out that Turkish's email customer service team is based in Turkey as well as Azerbaijan. Over the course of a Bolt ride, we picked this manager's brain and learned some helpful info for how to get the most out of interactions with the Turkish Airlines customer service team.
On a Bolt ride to Baku's airport, Derrick and I were chatting with our driver, a local from Baku who loves travel. He had spent a few years working at different luxury hotels throughout Asia before returning home to Baku, where he took a job as a customer service manager with Turkish Airlines. Specifically, he is one of the managers of the team responsible for replying to email inquiries. He explained that Turkish's email customer service team is based in Azerbaijan and Turkey, with both locations providing round the clock service 24/7.
RELATED: ToP Tips and Resources for Contacting Airlines Customer Service
Using Email Is The Way To Go
This manager told us that the way to get the fastest response when emailing Turkish is to include as much information as possible about your reservation while also making your request crystal clear. The goal should be to minimize the need for the rep to ask you any follow-up questions and eliminate any back and forth.
He added that every single email must get a response from the team, no matter how mundane. Even if a customer sends a one-liner with many four-letter words, the team is instructed to respond. So the next time you want to express your frustration via email, consider doing your fellow travelers a favor and not hitting send so the reps can focus on genuine email inquiries.
As for which email address to use, it turns out it doesn't matter. By way of background, instead of having a single email address for inquiries, Turkish has set up a dedicated email for each of its sales offices around the world. To find the email address, you can go to this page, then select the country and city, and “Sales Office”.
The manager told us that all email addresses are directed to the same inbox on the team's end, so it does not matter which sales office you direct your email to. I was surprised to learn this and that Turkish would go through the trouble of setting up all of these different email addresses to just have all correspondence end up in the same place.
Putting These Turkish Airlines Tips To The Test
Derrick and I were flying Turkish Airlines within a couple of days after this encounter. And as luck would have it, we both had to contact Turkish for help with our reservations. We followed these newly learned tips and included as much relevant info as possible.
In my case, I had booked my Turkish flight with Air Canada Aeroplan points. So I included the Air Canada and Turkish Airlines record locators, the ticket number, flight number and dates, and the departing and arriving airports, along with my question. I sent my question to the Washington-Dulles email address because that's what I had saved as using before. It was around 11:40 pm Istanbul time and I received a response in 29 minutes! That's even faster than most airlines via X/Twitter.
The response was also clear and concise and did not require me to ask any further clarifying questions. Derrick followed the same advice and also received a quick and helpful response addressing all of his issues.
Considering you can regularly wait on hold for well over 29 minutes when calling Turkish, I call this a definitive win.
What About Calling On The Phone?
Did you think I wouldn't make sure to ask about Turkish's dreadful phone reps? This manager confirmed that the vast majority of Turkish Airlines' phone reps are subpar, which he ascribes as mostly due to lack of motivation.
He mentioned Turkish has call centers in a handful of locations around the world, and added that the most helpful call center is in Africa (he did not divulge specific countries). I asked whether there are any tricks for getting our calls sorted to this call center specifically, but the answer was no, sadly.
Tips for Turkish Airlines Customer Service: ToP Thoughts
You never know who you may run into or what you may learn from them. An otherwise uneventful Bolt ride turned into a fascinating and informative chat where we learned about the inner workings of a major airline's customer service operations. I hope these tips can help you with future bookings involving Turkish Airlines!
What do you make of these booking issues? Come share your thoughts in our Facebook group!
