Turkish Airlines moves closer to Star
 

Isn't Europe congested with members? Does anyone know if any Star rep has mentioned anything abt Star accepting TY. Heard that getting Swiss in was difficult due to objections from Austrian.

Don't forget this is a Turkish Airlines press release, not a Star Alliance one. Even so, I would like to see TK in the alliance - they seem to have good routes in the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. And their web site looks pretty good, too (I like their route map)!

and from PRN to IST less than 90 minutes, they serve a full meal in Y.

there was a star press release
 

and this has been discussed in another thread somewhere.

dp

While THY is definately not my favorite airline and I avoid them most of the time, there are times that they are unavoidable for me and I would really love t see them in an alliance. It was my understanding that they were closer to Skyteam than Star. I had heard that the biggest problem was between LH and TK as the are very heavy competitors in the Turkey-Germany market as LH is the biggest foreign carrier by far and TK flies to pretty much every city in Germany..

People often don;t realize that TK s a pretty decent sized carrier with a fleet and loads larger than LOT and Spanair put together. It should be noted that TK has frequeent servces to a lot of places that others do not

This should now be the determining factor in getting new members in *A.

http://www.thenewanatolian.com/tna-18279.html


...Istanbul will host the annual meeting of the Star Alliance, the leading airline network of the world with 425 million annual passenger count.
CEOs of 21 airline companies, which are full or regional members of the Star Alliance, will meet in İstanbul for their annual convention and to initiate Turkish Airlines’ (THY) participation process....

So it looks like sometime in the first half of 2008.

http:///www.finanznachrichten.de/nac...el-7427216.asp
This article (in german) says, Star Alliance will officially announce tomorrow, that Turkish Airlines will become a member of *.

And here it is!!

Well there we go. Full member by mid-2008. A full 21 members by then. That's a lot of people.

Timeline?
 

I have a trip YYZ-IST in October 2007.

Any comments on timelines for mileage accrual etc?

Murm

Alas, this news is about 2 years too late for me. I was flying on Turkish Airlines (from Paris) for about 18 months in circumstances where I had Elite status with Aeroplan. Business class check-in and lounge access would have been nice. But that project is over now. However, I've got a small pile of Turkish airlines points and perhaps they won't go to waste, after all.

For those interested, here is the Turkish Airlines international route map:

http://www.thy.com/en-INT/services/d...route_map.aspx