I was so excited last fall when I found three saver business class seats on the nonstop United flight from Newark to Honolulu — and on a (convenient) Sunday morning! I was quick to get it booked with Turkish Miles & Smiles for 12,500 miles per passenger and $5.60, but it wasn’t necessarily easy (and I wrote about the experience here). Unfortunately, the time finally came for cancelling my Turkish Miles & Smiles award ticket for travel on United. We’ve heard some absolute horror stories about cancelling award tickets booked via Turkish and I will highlight one of them in this post. However, I am relieved to report that in my case, the process was smooth as butter. Slightly lumpy butter I guess if I’m being critical, but my miles were returned and my money refunded and the entire process took me less than 40 minutes. Others have not been so lucky. Here are our stories.
A reader horror story cancelling a Turkish award ticket
Just this morning, I republished our Complete Guide to Turkish Miles & Smiles with some recent updates (we added some additional sweet spots in both economy class and premium cabins and edited / updated some of the various tips). In a comment responding to that post, reader Darin shared a story that I wish I could say sounded unlike any other I’ve heard, but the truth is that we’ve had other only slightly less ridiculous cancellation stories in our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. Here was Darin’s story in its entirety:
I commented when you first put this post up about my EWR-TLV experience suggesting that there needs to be a huge asterisk that booking TK should be for experts only and even then I would think twice. I had another experience recently that underscores this. Honestly, as tempting as the sweet spots are, I really think everyone needs to proceed with extreme caution when attempting to redeem with TK.
My recent experience was booking EWR-HNL many months ago, a huge value at 12.5k miles in business. This booking has lead to literally hours of pain and suffering with TK.
- EWR-HNL service was cancelled by UA and in the end, I needed to switch to OGG due to intra-island COVID testing rules. I had initially switched to EWR-LAX-HNL, but by the time I needed to move to OGG, no award flights were available to switch to, so I ended up buying a ticket.
- I called TK to do the refund and after about 30 minutes on the phone with an agent, they told me they could not complete the refund and I would need to contact the agency who booked it (I explained that TK was the agent, but they insisted I would have to go to the CHI sales office in that case).
- Multiple HUCAs, all with the same result: we can’t do this, contact the sales office.
- No response from CHI sales office email, tried a few others as well.
- With the date of travel approaching and no resolution, I asked a phone agent if they could simply cancel the flights so I wouldn’t be a no-show and I’d deal with the refund later – they were able to do this.
- Wrote to TK customer care, stating specifically that phone agents couldn’t handle and I was getting no response from sales office. Their reply: “Please contact our call center for assistance”
- A TK expert on FlyerTalk suggested I personally go to a ticket office (airport ticketing).
- Went to JFK during hours listed on the website when they would be open – no one was there.
- Went to JFK a second time when I knew there was a flight leaving.
- At first, the ticketing agent said they couldn’t handle, I would need to reach out to the email address (that no one responds to). I insisted that no one responds there, she claimed she would follow up with them personally to ensure they handled. At this point, her colleague started speaking to her in Turkish and showing her something on the screen. She then started doing some work on her computer and said she would try to handle. The transaction took over an hour with several calls from the agent to someone at TK, but at the end of the day they charged me $25 per ticket and said my miles would be back in my account within 72 hours. Oh, and I also needed to provide IDs for every passenger on the itinerary (had to have these texted to me while I was there) and the original form of payment used.
- A couple of days later, I indeed had the miles back in my account.
tl;dr – their redemption rates are very tempting, but if you need to have ANY interaction with TK, it can be extremely painful and cause hours of work. Proceed with extreme caution.
To say that is really bad is an epic understatement. Clearly Darin knows how this should have worked and went far, far beyond what he should have had to do to cancel his Turkish award tickets.
To some extent, there is a risk of complication when making any partner booking and many people have experienced the bad side of that risk with increased frequency over the last year thanks to so many changes to scheduled plans (whether on the airline’s end or customer’s end). Part of the overwhelmingly poor customer service narrative of the past year (whether airlines not giving refunds, people spending hours on hold with Ultimate Rewards trying to figure out cancellation vouchers, etc) has been everyone dealing with adverse circumstances that they may not have previously faced. I don’t generally expect much customer service from the ticketing carrier / agency because things usually go as planned. When travel goes according to plan, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t usually need customer service from a frequent flyer program after my ticket is booked, I just show up at the airport for my scheduled flight and go. Out of the times when I have needed help, I’ve more often than not been frustrated — definitely not to the level that Darin describes above, but fixing a problem has rarely turned out to be easier than I expected.
In some circumstances, people report issues that they may be experiencing for the first time but that are not unique to one program or another. For instance, we regularly receive surprised comments from folks who booked a reservation through Airline A for a flight operated by Partner B and received no notification when the operating carrier (Partner B) changed/cancelled their flight. The operating carrier then throws their hands up in the air because it isn’t their ticket, telling you to call Airline A to get it sorted out. That situation can happen with any partner booking — to my knowledge, I don’t think I’ve ever been contacted by the ticketing carrier when the operating carrier makes a schedule change. I typically monitor the flights through the operating carrier’s site / app. But in the years I’ve been traveling on award tickets, I’ve rarely run into any major travel disruptions (forget about the magnitude of what we’ve seen over the past year). That is to say that while I feel for everyone who has had to deal with the headache of cancelled travel over the past year, the truth is that when things go wrong on any ticket you’ve booked with anyone other than the airline operating the flight (whether you booked an award through a partner program or a paid ticket through a travel agency), you’re in for a headache. So I tend to look past headaches like not being notified of the operating carrier’s changes or a ticket failing to reissue when the operating carrier cancelled and changed your flight. That stuff happens during normal times on almost all carriers, we just don’t hear about it happening to everyone all at once like we have this past year. It stinks when it happens (I’ve been there), but it’s not a knock on one program or another but rather the complexity of airline booking systems.
But what I just described above doesn’t explain away Darin’s issue. I can accept a headache with a flight that United cancelled or difficulty getting the ticket reissued on Turkish’s end after United changed the customer to a different flight, but those weren’t the issue. Darin was just trying to cancel his ticket and get his money and miles back. That falls well within Turkish Miles & Smiles terms and conditions: the program terms say that you can cancel in advance of departure and redeposit the miles for $25 per passenger (or get the miles reinstated after a no-show for $50 per passenger). At the very least, that should have been easy for a customer service agent to do. Clearly, Darin tried doing that a number of times and Turkish had difficulty for no reason I can imagine.
And therein lies the part of Darin’s story that really frustrates me: I don’t understand why he had so much trouble cancelling a Turkish award ticket (and to be clear, he’s not the only one — a member of our Frequent Miler Insiders said that after hours of calls and unanswered emails, he gave up on getting his miles back. It’s ridiculous that it got to that point over something Turkish’s program says it will do).
It is all the more frustrating because of the totally smooth experience that I had cancelling both pre-pandemic and again today. Unfortunately, the cancellation experience seems to be as unpredictable and inexplicable as the booking experience. When booking, nobody understands why some agents see saver award space that should be available and other agents do not. I am equally perplexed about the simplicity (or lack thereof) in cancellations.
My experience cancelling a Turkish Miles & Smiles award ticket
Last year, I booked a trip to Hawaii that looked like this:
- Newark to Honolulu, United nonstop business class (12.5K per passenger x 3)
- Los Angeles to Newark, United nonstop business class (12.5K per passenger x 3)
I planned to book a separate ticket from Hawaii to Los Angeles in order to spend a couple of days there before returning home.
At some point, United cancelled the nonstop from Newark to Honolulu and changed me to an itinerary from Newark to Los Angeles to Honolulu. My ticket appeared to be intact and I was able to select / change seats without issue. United also scheduled-changed my Los Angeles to Newark flight, moving me to something about 2 hours off of my original schedule. I had long ago added the flights to my United app and checked them periodically on United.com also, so I was disappointed but aware of the schedule changes. I didn’t hear anything from Turkish about the changes, but neither had I expected to.
Each direction was a separate reservation, each for three passengers. Newark to Honolulu was booked via email and I booked Los Angeles to Newark myself on the Turkish website. I tried to cancel the Los Angeles to Newark flight on my own since it appeared to give the option online, but I got an error. In hindsight, I realize that it was showing both my old and new flight online and I was checking the box to cancel both, so maybe that was the root of the error message. I’m not sure.
And so this afternoon, after Darin’s comment, I called the Turkish Airlines phone number as shown in the Complete Guide we published this morning. I spent a while on hold before speaking to an agent who took my ticket number, put me on hold, and came back to say that he had to transfer me to someone else. After another hold, a second agent picked up and had the basic details of my first reservation. I said that I needed to cancel because of schedule changes and he went ahead and (slowly) cancelled each passenger one at a time from the Newark-to-Honolulu flight. Each time after I confirmed that I wanted to cancel, he told me that the $5.60 refund would take 5-7 business days and the miles would be back in my account within a few minutes. Indeed, I repeatedly logged out of my Turkish Miles & Smiles account and back in to see the 12,500 miles from each ticket redeposit to my account. Once we finished the first reservation, we moved on to cancelling the second reservation one-by-one. Before I hung up the phone, I saw the 75K miles from all 6 tickets returned to my account:
From the time I first dialed the phone to the moment I finished the customer service survey and hung up was exactly 40 minutes and 0 seconds. That certainly isn’t fast by any measure, but Darin would probably hunt me down and punch me in the face if I complained about my hold time today.
I don’t yet see the cash refunds pending on my credit card statement, but nor would I expect to yet. Given that the taxes on these flights were only $5.60 per passenger, it’s only a total of $33.60 that I expect to get back on top of the miles.
In short, my experience cancelling a Turkish award ticket was smooth and simple as I would expect it to be. It matched my last experience cancelling (in pre-pandemic days) when I called and paid the cancellation fee for three passengers. Apart from having to pay one passenger at a time, it wasn’t a much different experience.
That is not to suggest that any of the many people who have reported issues did anything wrong. On the contrary, I am convinced that the smoothness of my Turkish award ticket cancellation experience has nothing to do with any special knowledge or experience I possess but rather a very random and unpredictable outcome. It’s not unprecedented: we’ve also received a number of reports from people with similar stories who were able to cancel their Turkish-ticketed trips on United flights with ease and for no fee due to COVID-related schedule changes. My case isn’t unique, but I don’t understand why it isn’t universal (and it clearly isn’t).
Cancelling a Turkish award ticket: Bottom line
The good news here is that it is indeed possible to score an amazing deal with Turkish Miles & Smiles — in addition to this trip that I had booked for a hard-to-imagine 12.5K miles each way in business class, I traveled to Hawaii a couple of times in 2019 in economy class for 7,500 miles per passenger from the east coast of the US. That is still amazing as is the thought of booking domestic one-ways anywhere else in the US on United for 7,500 miles. However, it isn’t all rainbows and sunshine; many readers have had difficulty getting refunded for cancellations — some eventually giving up and others like Darin going to unbelievable lengths that likely make them question the wisdom of booking with Turkish again in the future. Unfortunately, it is difficult to predict which type of experience you’ll get cancelling a Turkish award ticket, so it is up to each person to decide if the savings are worth the potential hassle. In a normal word where travel happens according to schedule, I’m sure I’ll take the gamble again (in no small part due to my overwhelmingly positive personal experiences), but I’ll probably hold off on booking non-imminent travel via Turkish until travel gets much closer to normal. When it does, paying less for 3 passengers than United would charge me for one is too good of an opportunity for me to pass up, but that’s a sentence I don’t imagine readers like Darin will be uttering soon and that’s fair.
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Finally found a goldilocks, bookable option on Turkish to Hawaii. Selected flights, selected passengers, but on the payment screen there was no way to proceed after entering credit card info. 🙁
Been that way for a couple of months unfortunately. Try email.
https://frequentmiler.com/booking-turkish-awards-is-now-even-harder/
Positive datapoint to report today: I tried calling around 9 AM central time, and the call center was not taking any calls. However, I waited a couple hours (around 11AM), and I was able to speak with someone after about a 12 minute wait. She was able to successfully cancel both the outbound and return portions of the trip for me for 4 people, and all 60,000 miles are back into my account. And the biggest surprise? She did not charge me the $25 per ticket reinstatement fee I was expecting to pay! I don’t know if she was new, or if there was something else that allowed it (both my itineraries had small time changes, around 5-15 minutes), but I was thrilled with how well things went.
I have a United ticket to Hawaii booked with Turkish miles for this upcoming summer and there’s been a significant schedule change (two layovers). I tried contacting United but they said it’s a Turkish ticket number and that they need to reissue the ticket. Does it actually need to be reissued? As a teacher, my family can only really travel in summer. If Turkish has no other availability and we choose to just suck up the schedule change, do we actually have to have the ticket reissued or can we travel with it as-is?
Thanks!
If the operating airline told you that your ticket needs to be reissued, they weren’t making that up and you don’t want to wait until you’re at the airport to get it resolved. That doesn’t mean that you need to find award availability again, Turkish just needs to reissue the ticket. This is the complexity of booking a partner award ticket – I don’t know why airline computer systems require this, but with significant changes like adding segments like that it does often require the ticketing airline to issue the ticket again. Hopefully it can be done easily with a call or email, but obviously the experience can vary. I wish you good luck with it – sorry!
Thanks so much, Nick and Darin. I finally called Turkish to have the ticket reissued due to significant schedule changes (I was hoping I wouldn’t have to take the extra segment, but alas no other availability) and none of the first three agents that I talked to seemed to know what to do so I kept getting transferred between the miles/smiles department and other departments. Eventually, one agent in the miles department tried to process it but seemed somewhat unsure of what she was doing. In the end said she submitted the tickets to be reissued and said that I would get an email in a couple of days with the new tickets. In the meantime, half of my ticket disappeared on United’s website and now it seems to only be HNL-ATL (instead of ATL-HNL-ATL) but I thought perhaps that was because of reticketing and maybe it would be fine. Well, I finally got the email from Turkish with the ticket numbers but now there are four ticket numbers total (2 for each passenger) and the United site is still only showing half of the ticket. I’m scared she messed something up and my ticket is no longer valid but don’t know how to check the validity of the ticket numbers. United only allows me to “find a trip” based on a confirmation code (which is now showing me only half the trip). Any suggestions?
Despite my own terrible experiences, I’ve actually never had a problem getting Turkish to just reissue a ticket where the changes were already reflected in the reservation. This seems to be a common issue and all of the call center agents I’ve talked to were able to handle it easily, so I wouldn’t hesitate to call. As Nick noted, you definitely do need to have it reissued any time the flight number changes, segments are added, etc.
I searched but never committed too a booking—question: when you search they only let you search for one pax initially. If you put in more than 1 pax then a pop up message states something like “you can book other pax after the first one is booked”. Something along those lines. Am I doing something wrong?
Short story is that you need to book an itinerary for yourself first before you can book for others, but you may be able to book via email / phone. Here’s a link to our Complete Guide: https://frequentmiler.com/turkish-miles-smiles-complete-guide/
I had such a similar experience to Darin’s that I found myself wondering “Did I write this up on Frequent Miler and don’t remember it?” The only difference is my experience was with the ORD ticket office instead of JFK.
My ticket had been booked by emailing the ticket office which seems like it’s potentially part of the problem. The other issue I seemed to encounter is that when canceled, my ticket somehow ended up split where the outbound flight was given a United ticket number and the inbound flight a Turkish ticket number.
My takeaway is that it’s a great deal, but I’m only using Turkish miles on United if I am highly confident I’m taking the flight, and there’s no way in hell I’m booking through one of the local ticket offices.
I don’t think it had anything to do with emailing the ticket office. I noted in the post that I had one reservation I had booked via email and I was able to cancel it without issue. Others have been able to also. Obviously you and Darin weren’t able to do so easily.
I’m confused about your ticket numbers — are you saying that part of your ticket number began with 016? That’s really weird that part of your ticket would get reissued on United ticket stock. That sounds like part of the problem — like United somehow reissued the outbound Turkish ticket on United’s ticket stock, which definitely would make it complicated to cancel since the Turkish agent wouldn’t be able to cancel the United ticket (and would likely need to request United to release control of the ticket back to them, which I know from past experience can be a pain point not unique to Turkish).
Definitely weird. I wouldn’t swear off the ticket offices though — I flew to Hawaii a few times in 2019 via tickets booked via ticket offices and I’ve now cancelled tickets booked via ticket offices a couple of times without any issue at all. Absent the unprecedented frequency of schedule changes and flight cancellations we’ve seen over this past year, I think it is less likely that there will be quite so many issues with these tickets.
@Brian: How close to departure did your outbound flight get cancelled?
Within about a day of departure. I don’t even remember if the flight was canceled or I canceled it. It was mid/late March of 2020 when the covid storm was just hitting. So perhaps the near-to-departure issue is what drove the outbound ticket to get issued in United stock (yes 016 ticket number). From my interactions with Turkish, this was clearly a key driver of the problem. BUT I do think that any competent airline would’ve found a way to address the problem with a phone call or two. My 2 phone calls to the Turkish 800 number, phone call to the United 800 number, multiple times filling out the generic customer service web form, multiple emails to different ticket offices (ORD, LAX, BOS), a visit to the downtown Chicago Turkish ticket office (they weren’t there because of covid), 2 visits to the ORD Turkish ticket counter (first time they weren’t there because they didn’t have a flight departing), calling and leaving a voicemail for the ORD Turkish ticket office (they gave me their phone number when I visited–no phone number is published anywhere on the web, but calling just got me a voicemail that nobody responded to): all of this yielded me bubkus.
Finally in October (7 months later!) I talked with some more seasoned folks on Flyertalk. They didn’t have any silver bullets, but gave me some ideas. I submitted a DOT complaint. I filled out a United refunds request and they sent me an email back saying they had sent the necessary information (whatever that is) to Turkish for them to be able to process the refund request. And then I sent one more request to Turkish via the generic web form. Some days later, I got an email from Turkish saying they’d given me back my miles. I don’t know exactly what triggered it.
You can see the Flyertalk thread here. Rereading it gave me PTSD. It does seem in hindsight that this was an unusual problem, but I still believe that another airline could’ve fixed the issue much easier/faster.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/turkish-airlines-miles-smiles/2026987-turkish-mile-refund-failed-options.html
The two “Unicorn tickets” I scored were 2 seats on UA101 IAH-SYD and 2 seats on UA179 EWR-HKG in Polaris — both saver level. The IAH-SYD option was completely unexpected as this was right before Covid and I originally was flying IAH-SFO-KIX. Once Japan started getting dicey I changed plans less than a week out. For laughs I searched on a Monday night for award space to SYD and found space for that Thursday night. I knew it was rare just had no idea how rare because when I boarded I was speaking with the FA and I told her I managed to find award space and she couldn’t believe it. I showed her on my phone. She said that UA NEVER opens space on that route. It was truly “when one door closes, another opens” moment. Waiting for my wife to get her Australian visa was a real nail biter too lol. The EWR-HKG was not as spontaneous but still exciting, if you will. I just had searched way far out in advanced and lucked out. Both experiences were brilliant. It’s a great feeling to get those opportunities since we spend so much time and energy accumulating miles.
Why did you decide not to travel?
A number of reasons. Probably the biggest is that my second vaccination appointment is during the flight, so that wasn’t going to work :-). Also not ready to get my kids on a plane yet. That day will come, but I’m perfectly content to sit out six months too long rather than six months too few. The islands aren’t going anywhere and neither are my points, so it wasn’t a high enough priority to go right now. I’ve got a lot of years of travel down the road and if I get struck by lightning tomorrow while I’m at home waiting it out I’ll go down in a blaze of glory knowing that I traveled more in the time I was here than most ever will, so either way I’m not going to be regretful. I had hoped it would happen when I booked it, but I knew all along that maybe it wouldn’t C’est la vie.
Thanks for sharing my story Nick and honestly I’ve had some smooth transactions as well. In this same timeframe, I’ve booked some JFK-LAX tickets and when UA pushed back the start dates, I was able to cancel them fairly easily with no fees*.
One theory I got from a TK expert was that if you’ve booked through an agent (even a TK ticketing office) AND there are multiple changes to the ticket, it basically becomes unworkable for the call center agents. That might also explain why the ticketing agent at the airport was having a hard time. But as with all things TK, who knows whether it’s a ghost in the machine or agents who just don’t know how to manage it (or don’t want to). The fact that you were transferred to another department is interesting – I’ve asked and have never once been able to get transferred to someone with more authority or knowledge.
*I’ll note as an aside that I was NOT able to switch the JFK-LAX tickets to EWR-LAX flights when no award space was available. I know UA can’t help here directly, but I tried anyway to see what they would say. They told me they would be happy to move me to a EWR-LAX flight, but they needed TK to call them as the ticketing carrier and, well, you can imagine how that conversation went with the TK call center.
Thanks, Nick and Darin for reporting on your experiences here. I shudder to think of what would have happened if Darin hadn’t been local to NYC, was planning to use a separate positioning flight to get to EWR, and didn’t have access to a live Turkish T/A.
I had book several tickets to Hawaii in business and economy using Turkish and last year to Europe on LOT business class RT.
But this time I ran into exactly same problem Nick describe on his post! Oh gosh you were such a life saver! I end up going to airport yesterday and having them cancel flight they said miles should be back in my account. with in 72 hours.
I’ve heard horror stories about dealing with schedule changes on flights booked with Turkish miles. If United changes the flight times, would I need to have the tickets reissued by Turkish? I have an upcoming flight to Hawaii that I booked through Turkish. All of the flight times changed shortly after booking, but the new flights are showing correctly on my United app. They are not, however, showing up on my Turkish account. I did message United on twitter to make sure my reservation is accurate on their end and they confirmed it’s good….but now I’m paranoid!
The horror stories involve needing Turkish to make changes to the flights, your situation shouldn’t be difficult. One thing I’ve noticed is that if you look at your itinerary on Turkish’s website, if there are two flights listed for the same leg (the original and new one), you need to call and have it reissued (and in my experience, that has not been an issue as long as the correct flights are in there). If it’s just a time change, the flight numbers are the same, and you don’t see multiple flights for the same leg, you should be ok. I would still check with UA, but it seems like you did that, and if everything other than the times looks normal in the Turkish version of the itinerary, I would leave it as is.
Unfortunately, the flight numbers have also changed, and there are two flights listed for each leg. I’m still hoping that the United agents were correct when they stated the tickets are issued appropriately. I wish it wasn’t so difficult to contact Turkish, but the recent wait times were quite long so I hung up.
If the flight numbers have changed, I’d say it’s worth calling Turkish to ask if they need to reissue the tickets because I believe they would. Difficult as it may be to wait on hold right now, imagine how it will feel when you’re standing at the counter on travel day waiting on hold while your plane takes off without you and there isn’t another United flight with saver availability so Turkish tells you they’re just going to have to refund your miles. I’d take the pain point of calling now versus that pain point later. Worst case you’ve spent an hour or two walking around your house with speakphone on only to find out that it’s already been taken care of. That beats the worst case of showing up at the airport with a problem that can’t be resolved in time. It may also vary based on when you call. I called on Friday around noon Eastern and holding twice and speaking to two agents and cancelling and the whole nine yards took about 40 minutes. Most of my experiences calling have been that someone answers without too long of a wait. Might try later in the evening hours or very early in the morning if you can’t get someone during the day.
I just called Turkish and the agent was certain the tickets are fine and do not need to be reissued. She claimed that only the flight times changed (even though I know for certain that two of the flight numbers changed as well). She was not very friendly, but maybe she has been overwhelmed with concerned customers calling about their tickets after reading this post! Hopefully everything will go smoothly at the airport now that I have confirmation from United and Turkish that the tickets are issued appropriately.
I had a similar experience to you a few months back. United cancelled the final leg of a flight, but I was not notified of this and discovered it when I checked the United app. I called Turkish Airlines and they were able to refund my tickets both to HNL and back with no fees in about 20 minutes. It’s so perplexing that this is the experience that I have and yet there are complete horror stories from others. Is it really just about finding a capable agent?
Cancelled an AA ticket in J on a DFW-KOA 772 for low miles because I’m not playing the stupid COVID multiple testing game. I’ll return when the nonsense ends.