Originally Posted by
Romanianflyer
Makes sense.
I also cannot believe that TK would welcome such a split of flights between ISL and IST given the huge amount of connecting passengers. It would make many short to medium layovers impossible if needing to change airport - and thousands of potential costumers would even simply not buy a ticket at all if they see an airport change is required. They might move over a few more flights with a relative low number of connecting passengers or routes of which they know they can take a hit as they are one of the few airlines operating it (for example the route to ECN route in Northern Cyprus being among the first which was already moved over).
For TK it would probably mean moving all flights to ISL at once, or stay at IST for the time being until ISL is completely ready.
Just to mention, all flights which are operated to/from Istanbul Airport (ISL)
are additional flights and
none are flights moved from Atatürk Airport. In the future, until the movement, TK
wouldn't move any flights from Atatürk Airport to Istanbul Airport. Yes, they would add new flights; as I heard there would be Dalaman and Bodrum flights and more TRNC ( Ercan ), Antalya, Izmir flights during the summer unless the movement occurs, also there are more rumors that Turkish Airlines plans to add more flights to Istanbul Airport from Europe, using their night-stopper aircrafts. ( For example an aircraft that remains parked from 22:00 to 08:00 in a European airport would operate a XXX-ISL-XXX rotation within the 10 hour. ) In addition to this, the number of domestic destinations would increase. Probably, the scheduling team of TK is now planning their ISL operations from 1 Mar to the next date of postponement and they would probably open reservations after the official announcement after 20 Feb.
Bilal Ekşi, CEO of Turkish Airlines, had posted this tweet on Tuesday that he mentioned new routes from Istanbul Airport would start soon.
Also flights ticketed directly from Turkish Airlines ( website, call center, sales office ) only permits tickets from/to ISL connect only to another flight to/from ISL. However, airport changes from/to SAW and from/to IST is permitted. To connect from/to ISL from/to IST or SAW, passengers must have separate tickets and it would be their own responsibility to make their connecting flights.