THY review: Ticket cancellation by personnel mistake

On June 4, 2022, I purchased a round-trip ticket IST-IAD-IST for myself and my husband from THY. (PNR ULLVL8; 19 August 2022 TK 187 IST-IAD, 28 August 2022 TK 188 IAD-IST). The purpose of this trip is to take our daughter to her new university in the USA for her first-year move-in, and she is flying on the same IST-IAD flight with a separate ticket [protected]). We have rented a car from Washington DC and would travel to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg.

On August 5th, I received a message saying that our return flight had been rescheduled and I should call the call center. When I called on August 6th at 16:44, the call center agent told me that since the schedule change was longer than 20 minutes I could make a change on my return flight without any charge. Based on that information I changed the return flight to August 27 TK 008, and the agent reserved seats for us. At 18:02 and 18:14, the same agent called me to say that she had also canceled the IST-IAD ticket without my consent, and since there are no places available in the economy class now, they would give us seats at Business, and we would fly at Business class with Economy class rights. I asked if we need to make any payments or if there would be any problems at the airport, and she confirmed that no additional payment is required and we would not face any problems. She then called to inform me that the tickets with Business class IST-IAD are issued [protected] and [protected]). At 22:09 the same agent called me again to tell me that there was a mistake made and they cannot give us seats in the Business class and they have to cancel the tickets, and they will put us on the waiting list for Economy class. I informed her that I cannot accept that and we have to be on that flight together with our daughter, and since that is their mistake they have to find a solution. She confirmed that she would do that, however later I recognized that both our outgoing and incoming flight tickets were canceled and we are on the Economy class waiting list.

The same night I filed an online complaint to THY, and they replied back to me in the morning acknowledging that it was a mistake caused by their personnel, however, they cannot assign us a seat since there is no place available in the Economy cabin.

Right now we do not have any tickets even though we made the payment two months ago, and since we will not be able to fly our daughter will be stuck in Washington without any transportation to and support in Pittsburg.

I appreciate your urgent involvement to resolve the matter.

Yesim Ar Kundakci