Istanbul Airport

Not Verified | The airport is modern, new and huge. But there is no proper management in terms of coordination. My flight from Milan was late and arrived in Istanbul 1 hour late as well. There was no coordination from ground crew for transit passengers and once you reached the gate, the ground staff are not trained about good customer service, non empathetic to customers and rude. They are fighting in front of delayed customers who missed its flight because of their unorganized and delayed flight. And it seems no body cares about their poor customers. You will see a lot of customers running and missing their connecting flights because of lack of system coordination. And once you missed your flight, ground staff in the gate will only inform the customers to look again for their customer service office because they are not interested at all. Never again! Train your staff about ground crew customer service.

✅ Trip Verified | Whoever designed this airport is an architect from hell. Yes, it's spectacular in many ways, truly enormous. Does this mean arriving flights can all use a jetway? No, of course not. TK has to manage this the old-fashioned, substandard, suboptimal way, with buses. It's 2023 and this is a brand new airport, for crying out loud. How about a few jetways for aircraft arrivals, then towing the aircraft to a parking spot if it's not to be used again immediately? We had a 2-h transit time and barely made the boarding gate in time (ground staff told me they'd be closing boarding in 5 minutes) - the airport is, simply put, too large, too poorly designed, to enable fit people to walk between arrival and departure areas in less time. How can this be? There should be a train running around the departure gates (A-F), but no, passengers have to thread their way among the hordes of other people trying to do the same thing, while avoiding the central walkway shopping "opportunities". Clearly, this bloody airport is designed to maximise sales profits (may all the outlets fail miserably, that's the curse I put on them!) rather than passenger convenience.

✅ Trip Verified | After carefully follow the signs for baggage collection, I arrived at the baggage hall and confirmed that I was at the right collection point by identifying my flight number. I moved out of sight of the notice board to watch for my case. Some time after they change the collection place from 20B to 20A. It was another hour before I realised that something was wrong, after findind someone with a basic grasp of English he pointed to where I should be waiting. I was by this time completely traumatised.

Not Verified | Airport is quite nice and clean but it is a real, real rip off. It is ridiculously expensive. A mars bar costs $6. A big mac on it's own $11. A small beer $11. Absolutely crazy prices. Never seen that in any airport and I travel a lot.

Not Verified |  The customer service here is very bad. The staff lack communication ability in English, not friendly. The airport is large and clean but lacks information desks, lacks water fountains. The walk from one gate to the next is far and there no transportation system to take from area to area. The food here is very expensive, almost makes one get upset expensive and to top it off the staff don’t communicate well.

Not Verified | Flew from Istanbul to Heathrow. Arrived at airport around 3 hours before departure. We proceeded through the baggage check which went smoothly, then proceeded to the check-in counters for UK bound flights. Which seemed to again have an additional identity check. At Check in our bags were overweight however the staff was happy to let us go without charging extra or ordering removal of items. Proceeded through immigration and then security check again which I must say is a state of art facility. Unlike Heathrow you don’t need to remove anything from your baggage saving the hassle. The airport itself is designed beautifully. One of the best I've been to. We then proceeded to the gate where we sat for nearly 3 hours because of significant delays to our flight - However that was all compensated when Turkish Airlines surprised us with a free business Class upgrade.

✅ Trip Verified | Airport looks modern, new and clean, but walking times are long. The biggest issue are the prices of the food courts. Everything is extremely expensive and the markup is criminal. We ordered a burger, regular fries + sauce from shakeshack which costed around 28 euros!

Not Verified | Had a 5hr layover during an international flight and was required to go through security twice - once upon arrival from Amman, and again before boarding the plane to the US. The second time we were patted down. The airport is huge without transportation to get you from one end to the other. Moreover there is almost no seating. We were given our gate only an hr before boarding so spent 4 exhausting hrs wandering around their mall.

✅ Trip Verified | The airport looks really nice and I understand that a lot of money has gone into it. However, the prices here for everything especially food are daylight robbery. I paid £7 for a slice of pizza and a meal at Popeyes costs an eye watering £15.00. Just bring your own food or better yet just wait until you board the plane and hope that you don’t starve yourself to death.

Not Verified | Not much seating near shopping. Not many water fountains for drinking water. Flight and gate announced only 30 mins prior boarding not giving enough time. Unfriendly staff, unable to help, with rude behaviour.