SunExpress - First Time Experience
 

Like most of you here, I have completed a lot of flights in my time but there are still a number of airlines I have not flown with. One of these is SunExpress, and I recently booked with them for a short trip to Antalya, Turkey. The round trip booking was completed directly on the very easy to use SunExpress website. There are three tariffs available: SunEco, SunClassic, SunPremium. I booked SunEco, which included 20Kg of baggage, enough for my 4 day trip. I also prebooked a meal which cost €9.99 and was surprisingly decent. The overall cost for BSL-AYT-BSL including the meals was CHF291, which I thought was an excellent deal for such short notice. The overall experience was generally very good and I would definitely use SunExpress again. In the next post I will include the two brief reviews that I wrote about the flights completed just a few days ago.

23.10.20 BSL-AYT SunEco (Y) XQ 111

My first venture into the skies since Coronavirus practically shut down the airline industry was this flight from Basel to Antalya, booked at the last minute. I had never before envisaged flying with SunExpress, a Turkish holiday airline connected to Lufthansa (their German unit was shut down during Corona), but they offered a reasonably priced and convenient nonstop service to Turkey's south coast. I was impressed how easy the booking process and online check-in was. The airport experience was totally civilized with boarding by row numbers, although Basel Euroairport has always been civilized. A Boeing 737-800 carried us in about 3 hours to Antalya with seating assigned in an odd way, resulting in a totally full row then an empty row, with rather uncomfortable but acceptable Recaro seats. The inflight experience was pleasant enough, although little children wandering around made it somehow trying, so I retired to the back of the plane. SunExpress offers a Buy on Board (BoB) service with a decent choice of hot and cold items on the trolley, as well as a premium service for the first row in what was otherwise an economy only cabin. I went for the option of pre-ordering a meal of chicken with ratatouille with a grain accompaniment a bit like Ebly. the meal tray included a number of packaged snacks and sweets, about 4 items, and a free drink (I had Turkish lemonade), all for the sum of €9.99. You would think cabin crews would be doing all they could to welcome back passengers, but not this lot. Really, this experience was good, but I stand where I have stood during the whole Coronavirus crisis: if all the airlines get wiped out by this crisis then at least we could restart with something more adapted to the 21st century, and not still based on 1950s ideas and technology, as well as being more suited to the environmental needs of our times. 7.5*
7S8 Tail number TC-SOG


27.10.20 AYT-BSL SunEco (O) XQ 110

Getting up at 02h45 in order to get from Side to Antalya airport on time made for a challenging day's travel. All went well, no problems at passport control or with Corona, the flight left on time and arrived early at Basel. The plane was almost completely full with no social distancing, however, and there were a lot of infants once again. They were mostly very good or went to sleep and the parents were excellent. The omelette with spinach and sausage that I pre-ordered was very palatable, although I had so little appetite due to my excesses in the all-inclusive Horus Luxury Paradise Resort. I tried to sleep most of the way to Basel, but the seats were so uncomfortable I quickly got back pain. They were the same Recaro rubbish as fitted on most of Lufthansa's fleet. The cabin crew were more amenable this time and were attentive and pleasant with all passengers. As soon as we hit the tarmac at Basel airport the usual idiots leaped up to open the overhead bins. People mostly ignored the organised deplaning by row number, which was supposed to safeguard Corona social distancing rules. 7*
7S8 Tail number TC-SEP

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

In Turkey and flights to/from Turkey, I don't know why but no-one observes row-by-row deboarding.
By the way, did XQ enforced the no carry-on rule in both directions or did they let in large carry-on's into the cabin?

I have never flown XQ on an international flight but when they did fly to SAW, I really enjoyed their ₺39.99 fares to Izmir.
Now, as they aren't flying to Istanbul, I am not able to fly them that often.

Carry on baggage was as normal, although the overhead bins were far from jammed. It was a pretty normal flight experience in most respects. Just, the outbound wasn't particularly friendly.

On the inbound, my boarding pass showed O-class. Does SunExpress have subclasses? There is not any sign of them on the electronic ticket receipt, but it does have ticket numbers starting 546. I tried to ask the gate agent about the subclasses, but when she finally understood me she said it was a "zero" to represent no class whatsoever, no Business, no Economy. The Premium seats are just the front row, which have a bit more legroom. Those, by the way, were full in both directions.

Thanks for reporting back,

SunExpress should not have subclasses. Probably they don't use the XQ system at BSL but use the system of the ground handling company so that might show O as zero as the indication of no fare buckets being available.

For Turkey departures or international departures that uses the XQ system, the subclass would show as "E" for Economy Class on all boarding passes.
The X-Leg seats in front does only indicate extra legroom and does not indicate another class of travel as you mentioned.

AFAIK XQ doesn't have any Recaro installed, those lovely slimlines you experienced were the Safran/Zodiac Z85 ;)

Really interesting, all of that (for people like me that like some of these technical details, anyway). Studying the O on the boarding pass it had the same size and shape as a zero elsewhere on the BP, so that would make sense. It also makes sense for these sorts of airlines (Ferienflieger) not to bother with booking subclasses. I was slightly surprised to see a ticket number though, starting with 564. But presumably XQ, like most of the low cost airlines, have their own reservation system which is much simpler but not compatible with other systems. The booking reference looked like a normal reference, though, and Checkmytrip recognized it (but Tripit didn't).

Oh, that's good to know. I can just about do Recaro, but I really don't like them. These, at SunExpress, on the other hand were painfully uncomfortable.

A couple of photos that I forgot to post earlier::

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...4c9bce26d1.jpg

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...c296617344.jpg


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...ed8650abc6.jpg