Review of Turkish Airlines flight Strasbourg → Istanbul in Economy

Hi everyone,

Here I am again with some Turkish adventures! My best friend and I went on this trip in September 2023. 5 days off, we wanted to discover Istanbul and we added a little spin off to Ankara for the day.

Turkish offers 3 weekly flights out of Strasbourg, and we booked our trip from Thursday to Tuesday. This cost a little over 200 EUR, round trip, with TK's lowest fare, which only includes a carry-on. Should be more than enough for a 5-day trip.

Our day trip to Ankara was booked directly with TK, for approx. 80€ at that time. Goal was first to travel with TK's long haul fleet (as they usually put 777s or 350s on this route) yet we didn't get lucky and they changed the planes to a 737 and an A330.

This is the final routing :

We reached Strasbourg Airport with the train, a very affordable and easy to use way to go to and from SXB.

There's only a 200 meter walk to reach the terminal.

Let's head to the check-in counters.

There a two check-in "zones", TK's desks are located in the B section.

Not a lot going on at the TK counters. We got our BPs in less than 5 minutes.

Security was a bit long to go through but we made it.
Strasbourg Airport is quite small and only offers a duty free shop and a bar/cafeteria.

We have a few minutes to kill, so here's the BP:

Let's go through Passport Control:

The non-Schengen area is not suited for a long wait, there's no shopping area.

A few flights are still scheduled today, LH, LO, A3 and IB are all EU-MP-flights, as it's Thursday. Usually we get one EU Parliamentary session per month here and flights are scheduled on Mondays and Thursdays when there's a session. I tried to get on one of these flights but the tickets are far too expensive (like 500 EUR to Frankfurt)…

Our ride to Istanbul arrived almost on time just before 10am.

We made our way to the upstairs lounge, where boarding should take place in a minute.

A pre-boarding is launched.

After a few minutes, we finally get to board the plane.

Our ride, TC-LCA, is a 5 year-old 737 MAX 8.

Business Class looks great !

but for us, good ol' Economy Class it is. Seat pitch is not great, wouldn't do 8 hours on this plane to be honest.

At least there's a nice IFE.

And the view is ok :)

2h40 should be enough to reach Istanbul.

Boarding is completed by 10:50.

And we push back at 10:54, with a 9-minute delay.

Let's take a look at the safety card:

After the safety video was shown on the screens, TK also shows a tourism ad about Turkey and the nice things to do there:

We taxied to runway 05 and took off at 11:06

Here's the north-east part of Strasbourg with the A4 motorway going north here.

As soon as the seat beat sign was turned off my friend got his personal space reduced… recline is pretty good on these seats.

After 45 minutes of flight, we got served our meal as we flew over Venice.

A breakfast dish is served, with warm bread and cutlery.

Here's the egg frittata. No choice this time. Although this is a breakfast dish, beer was available.

The rest of the flight went by smoothly and after 2 hours, we've reached the European part of Turkey.

We began our final approach on IST at around 14:30 local time.

Landed at 14:38.

Taxi was extremely long… took almost thirty(!!!!) minutes to reach the gate.

Gate was reached at 15:03, 13 minutes after our scheduled time of arrival.

Here's a last look at TC-LCA:

Let's head to passport control.

It took 20 minutes to go through passport control.
We then took a taxi to the city, it cost almost 25 euros, or 750 TL… inflation is still spiking at 60% p.a in Turkey.