Sharing my experience with the covid test at IST airport. Many hospitals in the city offer a covid test with results in 24 hours but it is cheaper at IST although they recently increased the price from 110 TRY to 250 TRY. I previously read on the internet that they give results in 2 hours but that is somewhat misleading so hopefully some FTers can avoid pitfalls based on my experience.
I had a flight at 1pm and I arrived at IST at 8:30am to have some room for error. You need to walk to the ground floor (arrivals) all the way to the end of the building near door 14 which is where covid tests are given. The various steps are fairly well explained on signs at the entrance but there was a queue for step 2 which is only to pay for the test. Then step 3 you need to go to another counter to get a bar code sticker - this seemed like an unnecessary extra step which could have been combined with step 2. Then step 4 was for the test itself, there was another queue but no more than 10 minutes for the swab test.
For me the main surprise is that I expected to get the test result in two hours so before my flight (according to articles on the internet published early July), but it was not the case. First off, there was maybe 45 minutes between the time I arrived at the airport and the time of the swab test, then 1.5 hours until they sent the results to the lab, and then another 2 hours until results were available online. In fact the sign at the airport says 4-24 hours which is more accurate than the overly optimistic reports online. Given the timeline, I was already sitting on the aircraft ready for takeoff by the time results were available online, fortunately I did not need the covid test for that flight but rather for my flight the next day, otherwise I would have been doomed.
So for anybody planning to need the test results for a flight on the same day, you need to plan to be at the airport at least 6 if not 7 hours before departure time and even then it might not be safe. For such scenarios might as well get the test in the city although it will be more expensive
