Review of Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Athens in Economy

A visual of my nonstop flight from Istanbul, Turkey to Athens, Greece which would cover a short distance of 345mi/556km. 

introduction

Welcome to another trip report! 
After spending a wonderful week exploring and sightseeing here in Istanbul, it was sadly time to head back home to the US. We'd have to meet our flight back to the US with Delta in Athens. Therefore, to get to our flight there we'll be flying with Turkish Airlines once again on this leg. This was part of a round trip fare within a round trip fare from Athens. Not very practical but that's just how it worked for us on this particular trip. As mentioned on my previous trip report, I paid a round trip price to fly with TK for about 240 USD per person. I'm quite excited as this will be my second time flying TK and had a very pleasant experience on my first trip with them just the week prior.
For this trip, I had selected the first morning flight of the day to Athens which was scheduled to depart at 7:55a. We had to wake up very early to catch the 4am bus to the airport. We walked our way from our accommodation near Taksim square to the bus stop where we'd be taking a Havaist bus to the airport.  

We finally made it to our bus which runs about every 40 minutes or so to the airport. The bus fare at the time was about 6USD per person/each way. 

The new Istanbul Havalimani international airport isn't necessarily close to the city center and it takes about an hour to reach there by bus (depending on traffic). 

arrival at airport

About an hour later we arrived at the airport with no issues. The Havaist bus dropped us off right outside the airport entrance.

First impressions of the airport was amazing. Felt very clean, bright and open.

What surprised me the most was that we needed to go through a first round of security check point just to get access to the check -in desks which was very weird and inconvenient. I'm not sure why they would need this as this is normally the case when entering airports in less developed third world countries from my personal experiences. Despite there being no one in front of us, it still took us a solid 15 minutes to reach the other side as their machine kept finding something around my waist and the machine kept beeping. Nonetheless I made it to the other side just fine and in one piece. 

It was quite confusing finding a TK counter to see an agent as a lot of them were dedicated to different regions. But eventually I finally found one. Initially I wanted to see an agent to print my boarding pass and see if I could change my seat. Before entering the queue to see an agent, another TK personnel pretty much yelled at everyone that 'you could only see an agent if your checking a bag, nothing else'. So hearing that loud and clear I found a few self kiosks and went to see if I could do it there. I was able to pull up my reservation, print our tickets and to my surprise be able to select a seat free of charge. On the mobile app TK wanted to charge me somewhere around 30USD for a window seat which I thought was ridiculous  for an hour flight. 

All in all the process took no more then 10 minutes. I was still flabbergasted at this point by the way the TK personnel treated us at check-in and hoped it was just a one time occurrence but unfortunately that wouldn't be the case as you'll see. 

airside

After getting our boarding passes we then made our way to passport control which took ages to go through. To put it simply it was very inefficient and the officers processing us were not the kindest. They made the US border control officers look very nice compared to them which says a lot. After that, quickly followed security control where we had TSA style officers (if not worst) awaiting us. They man handled our stuff and physically threw our items all of the place. In all my years traveling around the world, I've never seen nor had experience even remotely close to this. I've personally seen very bad TSA officers in the US and were the worst on my list but going through security there but this takes the icing on the cake at number one, very sad.
That process took a total time of an hour and fifteen minutes. By this time our flight would be boarding in just under 20 minutes and knowing from previous trips reports about how large this airport is I wasted no time looking for my gate.    

Not long after our gate was announced at D6.

The airport's architecture is aesthetically pleasing and very beautiful. However, for a big International airport I was also surprised that there weren't any trains that run within the terminal as some of these gates are very far once you clear security. It almost feels unnecessarily too large.  

After what felt like an eternity of walking, we made it to our gate with just 10 minutes to spare before boarding starts. Mind you we arrived at the airport 3 hours before departure but with all those security check points and inefficient passport control, it quite literally took over 2 hours to clear all those this morning. I'm not sure if this was me having a very unlucky day but had we arrived at the airport 2 hours before departure we'd most likely have missed our flight.

my aircraft

Here's my B777-300ER that'll be taking me on this short hop to Athens this morning.

Some information about my plane:
Flight number: TK 1843
Aircraft: Boeing 777-3F2(ER)
Registration: TC-LJB
Delivered: Sept. 11, 2015 
Age: 8 years (at time of flight)

This aircraft is configured in 49 business and 300 regular economy class seats for a total capacity of 349 seats. For this flight I picked 46K, a window seat towards the back of the cabin and my mom 46J. (Seat map courtesy of aerolopa) 

boarding

Boarding began on time and I boarded within my assigned group. Warning, here comes another hiccup with TK personnel. All the agents that were boarding the flight (there were three) could visibly see that they didn't want to be there and didn't bother to hide their emotions as well. As I got to one of the agents to see my passport and scan my boarding pass, I kid you not the agent yanked my passport off my hands therefore causing some papers I had within my passport to fall out all over the floor. The agent didn't even look at me the whole time this happened and didn't even apologize for the way she handled this. I was left in shock by this experience and naturally was a little terrified for what could await for me once I got onboard this flight.

At the boarding door was a friendly FA who welcomed me onboard and directed me to the second aisle. He was quite literally the only friendly person I've encountered this whole morning since I left my accommodation. Here's a walk through business class which looks quite nice and chique.

Walking through the main economy class section.

seat

Made it to my seat for the next hour, 46K.

Each seat had a nice sized PTV. This aircraft has a newer cabin then on my previous flight from ATH to IST. The PTV has a more modern and crisp screen compared to my last flight.

The legroom room situation is pretty good for economy class standard. These seats offer 31" of pitch and 6" of recline.

There's even an added footrest which you don't normally see on many economy class seats.

I also have a great view of the wing, sadly it's raining outside though.  

Much like the previous flight, awaiting at each seat was a very fluffy pillow and pair of headphones.

There is also a controller to control the PTV should you not want to touch the screen.

A coat hook is also provided but don't know for sure if people actually even use this.

Here's a look at the tray table which can be folded out and extended.

I'm glad that TK opted to stick with the 3-3-3 configuration on their 777s. While most other major carriers prefer to squeeze economy pax in a very uncomfortable 3-4-3 configuration. This made the cabin feel slightly more comfortable and spacious in my opinion.

in-flight entertainment

TK's in-flight entertainment has quite a bit of content from movies, tv shows and music. There's definitely enough content to keep one entertained on a long haul flight. 

A very unique feature to TK is that they have 2 exterior cameras (one facing forward and one facing downward). I learned about this feature towards the end of my last flight 😅.

But ultimately my favorite part was the moving and interactive map. This one was much more detailed and interactive then on my last TK flight.

Boarding is complete and to my surprise our flight was practically empty. The load was somewhere around 10-15% with practically no one in business class. In the aft economy class section there was at most just 15 people including me and my mom. This was the emptiest  flight I've been on to date.  

Cabin lights were dimmed for takeoff.

Shortly after the safety video began playing.

pushback/takeoff

You can check out the full taxi and takeoff video down below:

We pushed back right on time.

We'll be departing off runway 36 this morning.

Until next time Istanbul 🇹🇷!

Eventually we broke out of a dense layer of clouds to a beautiful morning sunrise.

Here's a brief look at the seatback contents which only consisted of the safety information card and an air sickness bag.

breakfast service

About 15 minutes into flight, while we were still climbing, breakfast was served.

Contents of the breakfast were:
A bread roll (cold)

Strawberry yogurt 

The entree

Butter and strawberry jam

And lastly a container of water

Afterwards another FA came by offering drinks, I went for a coke.

The entree was quite delicious and was similar to the one I got on my previous flight from Athens to Istanbul just the week prior. It contained turkey, cheese wedge, olives, tomatoes and cucumber. 

The highlight of the meal would have to be the strawberry yogurt which was very delicious. However, we weren't provided with any spoons to eat the yogurt with so we settled eating it with a fork 😅.

Overall the meal was very delicious!

A view of the cabin inflight.

A few moments later the captain had announced that we had just began our initial descent into Athens.

The FA's began preparing the cabin for landing.

landing/taxi

You can check out the descent and landing in the video below:

It's nice to see from the pilot's perspective the airport and runway straight ahead.

We'd be landing on runway 03R

Welcome to Athens!

We are definitely in Aegean territory 😅.

arrival at gate

We arrived at the gate 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

One last view of my seat.

Next off, passport control.

One last view of our Boeing 777-300ER, thanks for the very fun and safe flight!

This concludes the trip report. Thanks for reading!