Booking flights to Istanbul on Turkish Air
 

I'm having a terrible time trying to book a flight from LAX to IST on Turkish air's website for this September. I get as far as the flight and the price and then it just freezes. I called the airline and the person I talked to was somewhat incomprehensible, but she did hold the 2 tickets for me with a 72 hour confirmation request...at a price $200+ higher per ticket. But the email confirmation she sent has no price on it. Arrgh. Any suggestions? I can't remember the last time I used a travel agent, but maybe someone used to booking with this airline can help?

We booked some out of IAD last week. No problems on our end, but others in our group were doing open jaws and needed help. A travel agent was needed ... and came through. I know Turkish adds a fee for phone resses, but that sounds too high.

It sounds high but the fare code the OP was buying might have sold out.

OP, can you book through kayak, travelocity, or another OTA?

I booked on-line yesterday - also for September - with no trouble at all. But it was a simple, round-trip flight. I wish they had the comfort seats available, but the web-site said not on this flight. So, I cannot make seat arrangements until July 1st, but otherwise it was an easy IAD >< IST purchase.

Just curious, if you had to pay a fee for talking to a Turkish Air agent, why wouldn't you just use your local travel agent? I would never use Expedia, Travelocity etc. to actually book a ticket. If you have to change your ticket it can become a real problem. I believe you would pay change fees to them as well as the airlines. I just use them to compare prices.

Try using a different browser, like Chrome or Mozilla. The Turkish Air site may be incompatible with whatever you're using.

I am a techijjit and had no probs with either the TAL or Atlas Jets websites. Using MacBook, Firefox browser.

This has been like the Twilight Zone. The online price keeps going up, and the booking agents on the phone (bad connections, heavy accents) don't seem to recognize that there was ever a request made through customer relations to look into this, even though I have the case number and screen shot of the original price. It's just a simple LAX-IST RT purchase. Guess I just give up and pay the higher price.

The longer you wait, the higher the prices are probably going to get.

Was there a reason you wanted to fly Turkish Air? Air Canada shows tickets as low as $1009. Granted, Turkish is the only one that offers non-stop service and if you want Turkish then buy from another OTA instead of the airline website.

Or book another airline to London or Frankfurt or a major hub, then fly TAL to Istanbul. My experience w/TAL is that once in Europe, the flights to Istanbul are numerous, relatively consistent in price from week to week, and easily booked online. We flew Rome - Istanbul - Rome last month. Easy.