Turkish Airlines
TK 18 – Business Class (I)
YYZ-IST (Toronto Pearson International Airport – Istanbul Atatürk International Airport)
May 26, 2018
10:30PM – 3:15 PM +1
Booked: Boeing 777-300ER
Flown: Boeing 777-300ER
At about T-55, we headed down to the gate. We passed by the beautiful sculpture in the international departures hall. Every time I pass by, I always go stand in the middle of it and listen to the echo of my voice. If you’re through, you should try it… it’s pretty neat.
We headed over to Gate E71. In true Turkish Airlines style, the boarding area was pretty messy. The line queue was managed by one poor guy who was trying to separate the gate through localized public address announcements.
There was a schizophrenic flight display sign; boarding, but take a seat. LOL.
While we were waiting near the front of the maze, we were charged by several dozen (probably about 30) families with small children pushing to the front without despair. Eventually, children, elderly, business class and Turkish Elite and Star Gold, all called to board at once. It was about 90 people trying to get on the flight through a crowd of the remaining 150. It seems like they’d lost interest in bothering to separate the groups.
Once we were walking down the jet bridge, we learned that double door boarding was in effect today. We passed by a manned jet bridge and boarded the aircraft through the business class door at L1.
The Turkish Airlines Boeing 777-300 business class cabin is configured in a 2-3-2 configuration. We were in seats 3J / 3K on the far right hand side. There are comfortable seats for traveling with a partner, but hardly state of the art. Or at least they were state of the art about 12 years ago when they started getting rid of reclining chairs up front.
There were a variety of seat controls and adjustments.
I pity those in these awkward middle seats. It would be miserable to be stuck in the middle seat on a ten hour flight.
On the seat ottoman was a shoe bag, containing slippers.
We had a twenty minute delay departing. Turkish has updated their AVOD entertainment to have refreshing scenic images of Turkey cycling as you are welcomed on board. The photography was really beautiful and inspires a trip to Turkey. There were lots of interesting things to look at; some landmarks familiar and some not.
As we settled in, we got the usual Turkish offering a non alcoholic pre departure beverage of water, orange juice or the terrific lemon and mint. We both had lemon and mind which is always a great start. At least if it is a non-alcoholic offering, Turkish does it right with a selection of interesting drinks.
While were on the ground, the menus were dropped off.
The menu package was pretty impressive.
The drink list was even more impressive. It contained 11 wines, although 4 of them were from Turkey. There were 3 whites, 5 reds, a champagne, a rose and a desert wine. There is no easy way to take the menu photographs.
We were encouraged to complete a breakfast card for the breakfast order.
An entertaining safety video was played twice; one in Turkish and once in English. It's apparently hosted by a magician on the left.
Noise cancelling headphones were also presented, in addition to “Bentley” fragrance amenity kits. There were mostly useless things in here. The Bentley branding was limited to a brochure, lip palm and a small tube of body lotion; a pretty chintzy offering that’s been completely forgotten about since I took the trip.
I checked out the in flight entertainment system. It had a good number of movies and enough to keep you entertained for several long haul flights.
Prior to the dinner service, we had a towel service. This was followed by a pre supper cocktail. Champagne was on order tonight.
The dinner service started with a small mezze platter, and soup, plated together. This came with the oh so cool LED candle light in the sky which is a silly but excellent touch of ambience at cruising altitude that I always look forward to on Turkish Airlines.
The main course was steak and arugula with potatoes. I love having steak and red wine on a plane but it seems really hard for airlines to invest the money to execute it right. Today’s steak was awfully tough, worse than sirloin and quite grainy in texture. Unlike the Bentley amenity kit, this I did remember for how lousy it was.
Desserts were brought around from the cart, which is always super impressive. I ended up with chocolate mousse based on appearance selections.
Dinner was a leisurely affair with service completed about 2.5 hours into the flight. The cabin was turned down for the evening with the window shades closed and the service cleared. A small bottle of 330 ml water was dropped off at the seat. There was an offer to have the bedding made up but I elected to catch up on the trip report before turning in. We were just off the coast of Newfoundland by the time that we were done the food festivus.
Turkish Airways offers free wifi to business class passengers. Unfortunately, the connection is super slow. I did a speed test and only managed 6 MPS with the application crashing outright on the upload portion.
After dinner, I turned down for the evening and tried some rest. It was a bit of a bumpy flight and I managed about 4 ½ hours’ worth of sleep.
I woke up over of Dubrovnik, Croatia to the sounds of breakfast. Service was prompt and the first breakfast offering was presented within 10 minutes of waking up.
Breakfast started with a coffee, a strawberry smoothie, cut fruit and bread offerings.
This was followed by an omelet with potatoes and peppers.
After breakfast, I stocked up some water from the self service bar which had been mostly packed up for the flight. We had a straight in approach with no holds, touching down at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport. We were dumped off at one of the last gates on the international wing. As a result, we had a long walk to the connections check point.
Turkish Airlines is a great way to get across the Atlantic. Thanks to generous business class reward availability, and no fuel surcharges, it’s not usually too hard to find flights with them. Although their business class seat isn’t class leading by any means, their tasty DO and CO catering is a great way to pass the time while you’re on board with them. Add to this the fact that they fly almost everywhere, and you have a winning combination.