Thank you very much for your kind comments,

First, I would like to mention that my comments below are based on my personal experience, the experiences that I hear in person or through means such as FlyerTalk, and some comments made by TK sales office staff when I asked some questions to them. I would like to add that I don't work for Turkish Airlines or any affiliate company, nor worked in the past, and don't know any executive that is specifically working on the Miles&Smiles program at the Istanbul HQ's.

I can't make a comment on why TK is the only carrier that is doing this but I could give you a general insight that it's very likely that these kinds of fraud happened a lot on TK M&S in the past, and since the number of OTA's who purchase miles and sell award tickets for cash, albeit with their own profit, has increased; TK wanted to take action.

I could sense the logic of why TK is blocking award tickets online at several cases for someone to use their miles for a 3rd person since the general mindset in Türkiye is not based on honor system but to always fix a loophole to avoid potential issues that might arise. Since there is no public disclosure of the terms&conditions of the agreements between those bank transfer partners and Turkish Airlines, it's difficult to comment but what would happen during a fraudulent case, how would TK be affected as well as it is difficult to mention how TK is evaluating risks in this case since there is no publicly available information.


This is a very nice point, if TK thinks that any subsequent award booking of a member would be fraud, TK would take action and cancel those award tickets immediately and suspend the account of that person immediately asking for evidence that the transaction was legal.

A few months ago, I recall someone telling me about a case about a Turkish person ( in terms of citizenship ), purchasing an award ticket to a Korean colleague which they work at the same company but different countries and offices, which resulted in TK suspending the Turkish persons account and asking evidence that this transaction was legal and evidence that he knows who is that person. I was not provided any update on this case, neither the person who told me about the case, so I am unable to tell what happened in the end but it would be incorrect to assume that people who has already purchased their first award ticket is not targeted.

To add on, I have also heard countless stories of fraud treatment, especially when Elite gifting for Elite Plus membership is done. As I have mentioned earlier at FlyerTalk at different threads, at websites such as Letgo, Ebay, etc... there are multiple people selling these gift rights for cash.

For this part, I was implying that, myself or any other Miles&Smiles member that I know, who has booked, flown, credited tons of Turkish Airlines flights ( as well as Star Alliance flights ) to Miles&Smiles, seem not to have this issue, however, it's mostly those people who are first timers who transfer credit card points and try to book an award with no stable account history. In my opinion, this is an important point on this issue.

There is actually a solution but it might not be effective for everyone since the success rate is not 100% but higher than dealing with the website or call center.

Sales offices usually have knowledgeable employees with better training, as they are employed by TK whereas most call center employees are outsourced, and they certainly could issue TK or partner awards for 3rd party people, however, on most occasions, they use a chip-reader credit card machine where you type your credit card PIN as well as they scan your ID to make sure that the person redeeming the mileage is the account holder. The bottleneck here would be that some TK sales offices around the world are closed to the public and some airport ticketing counters would refuse to help unless you're traveling on that specific day and your issue is regarding that specific flight.

If you get a knowledgeable agent at a sales office, they would also know how to search and add an award flight manually, which won't appear on the TK *A partner booking platform, and which call center agents would constantly say that they are unable to see that flight.

This method would also involve time such as transportation to/from the office, parking/public transportation costs, as well as some people would have location constraints since they wouldn't have an office nearby.