Leaving Asia - harder than it sounds
Trip dates: January 5, 2017 - January 9, 2017
After we left Chiang Mai, we flew to Bangkok for just 2 nights before we were going to go to Europe.
We had originally planned to visit the Grand Palace since we didn’t get to go in last time, but we got into Bangkok late the first night due to flight delays. I decided that I’d rather not rush rush and be in the humidity the next day so we took some R&R time instead. We ended up going to a seafood restaurant looking for something like Singapore chili crab; it wasn’t exactly the same but it was still pretty tasty. We also went back to a spa place to get body scrubs and Thai massages to pamper ourselves one last time before leaving SE Asia and cheap massages.
We were supposed to leave Bangkok on Sat morning, Jan 7th, to fly to Istanbul. There, we'd have a night and a full day to sightsee and eat some Turkish food before heading to London on the 9th. Well, mother nature conspired to ruin those plans!
<entitled traveler rant - feel free to skip!>
Turkey, and especially Istanbul, got slammed with a big winter storm system on Friday the 6th that continued on and off for the next four days, dumping over a foot of snow in 24 hours on the 6th/7th. This impacted the region greatly since the infrastructure for dealing with this snow isn't very good, especially at Ataturk Airport. Turkish Airlines ended up cancelling over 1,000 flights over the next 3 days, including our original flight and first rebooked flight. However, the flights were all being canceled with varying degrees of advance notice and with very little information being proactively provided. This caused us a ton of anxiety since there were only agents at the airport in Bangkok for short amounts of time as Turkish only had 2 flights a day from Bangkok to Istanbul. Plus, the call centers for Turkish were all powerless to actually help us rebook tickets and had tons of hold time; they kept referring us to the service center that never picked up or the airport to get rebooked.
We ended up spending an extra 48 hours in Bangkok; one night with SPG points because we didn't want to leave the hotel the first day and a free stay from Turkish at a decent hotel with good food buffet. On the plus side, Lishan's tummy wasn't doing so hot, so the extra time gave her more time to recover. But on the downside, we ended up at the hotel with no information on how we were actually going to get to Istanbul. We were initially trying to re-route to London since that’s ultimately where we needed to be, but because our original itinerary was only to Istanbul, Turkish said they could not (or would not) allow us to re-route for any reason.
I could probably rant even more about Turkish, but instead I’ll pivot to talk about our Star Alliance Round The World ticket and how this impacted the situation. So when you pay for the RTW ticket, there are mileage tiers that affect the ultimate price along with specific routing fare differences. We contacted the RTW ticket desk (which is through Lufthansa) to try and change our actual flight to go through London. Unfortunately, this would have pushed us up to a higher mileage tier since it would be way more flight miles than our existing itinerary and would have cost > $2500 to make the change. So instead, we used the RTW ticket desk to help confirm us on upcoming Turkish flights, which they were very helpful in doing. Without these folks, who knows how long we might have been stuck in Bangkok! Though it probably also helped us that Turkish didn’t seem to be re-booking anyone automatically, so who knows.
So now, we were rebooked on a flight leaving 2 days later than we wanted to, but we had missed a non-refundable hotel stay and another non-refundable flight to London (not with Turkish) and were going to miss out on the beginning of our Airbnb stay in London.
- We were happy that the hotel we were supposed to stay at allowed us to cancel without paying anything - woohoo!
- Our flight to London would not give us a refund, though we can apply the flight costs as “credit” plus a change fee in the future. Given we do have other flights in Europe, we will hopefully be able to use that but who knows.
- We likely will just have to eat the initial costs for Airbnb, as there’s no recourse for the host either to recoup costs. At least our accommodations in Bangkok were either covered or very cheap.
Then, we still needed to have a flight to get us to London from Istanbul! This was hard to book ahead of time because we were trying to make sure we’d be able to get into Istanbul, so we bought this ticket the night before ,after we saw the plane coming in to Bangkok wasn’t canceled, though it was still a bit stressful. There wasn’t a lot of availability and there were some absolutely bonkers flight prices - lowest from 500 up to 1,000 for an economy ticket from Istanbul to London (usually with 1-3 connections). There was a Ukraine International Airlines flight in first class that we hoped to book but it ended up being sold out while we were waiting for more confidence on our flight. So instead, we ended up booking flights through Azerbaijan Airlines to go from Istanbul to Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan), then on to London. This meant we would go backwards, but at least we’d get to London only one day late. And we’d see Azerbaijan (from the airport and briefly) which was never on any list of ours, but figured why not!
We also then booked the same hotel that we had previously canceled for a 1 night stay in Istanbul before we flew out, since they were highly rated and they had been so kind to allow us to cancel for the previous stay.
</end travel rant>
The day we finally got out was still pretty stressful. We were able to check in with little difficulty as there was some semblance of order to the lines compared to the previous days. Since we were flying business (part of our RTW ticket), we could go in any Star Alliance gold lounge. Lishan did her research and so we spent the majority of our time in the EVA Air lounge which had really great food and decor and was a very comfortable lounge overall. Definitely in the top of our lists for best lounges we've been to.
Our flight had 3 different departure times according to Turkish, the airport, and FlightStats, but we boarded the aircraft somewhere in between the Turkish and airport times. FlightStats was generally about 30-50% accurate for Turkish flights which was not helpful in this situation as well. In the end, we departed around 3 pm for our originally scheduled 11:30 AM flight. The flight itself really didn’t have much to call out - it was on a newer 767 but still doesn’t compare to the other top tier Asian airlines business class offerings (Cathay, JAL, ANA).
We ended up landing around 11 PM, cleared immigration super fast with the Turkey eVisa, and decided to take the metro/tram to our hotel since it was a lot cheaper than a taxi and so we’d know what to do the next day as we returned to the airport.
It was crazy to see the amount of snow everywhere and slush in the streets. Felt like we were in Chicago after a blizzard, but with less equipment/preparation to plow and salt the roads.
The next morning, we got up super early just to try and check out the surrounding area before our flight. OK fine it was 8 AM when we left, but the sun was just starting to come up and it was not very busy outside. We walked around for about an hour, primarily to see the Blue Mosque, Sultanahmet Square, and the outside of the Hagia Sophia. It was very cold and windy, so an hour was good enough.
For how few people were out, the reputation of Istanbul for having pushy shop keepers, taxis, etc. was so true. Every few steps, someone was trying to engage us in conversation, inviting us to their shop or trying to take us somewhere, it was a bit overwhelming. They were also super persistent! You couldn’t just say no thanks, that was just like saying “please keep asking me”. Not the best short experience.
After our brief walking tour of Istanbul, we headed to the airport for our flight out. Ataturk airport was not as crazy as we thought it might be, given all the cancelations. We had to wait in line at Azerbaijan’s counter, where I got schooled by a little old lady and her big family in how to advance aggressively in a barely moving line. It also took 2 Azerbaijan airline workers to be OK with our passport going to London, as their system had some funny wording about US passports and if we needed visas going to the UK.
Overall, the experience we had on Azerbaijan was pretty positive. The flights were operated well, the hot food wasn’t bad (the rest of the plate was pretty so-so), free drinks (possibly wine too? didn’t check but saw folks getting pours without paying), and we were able to get out of Istanbul only a few minutes delayed. The airport in Baku was also very modern and nice. Maybe we’ll have to go back and actually visit Azerbaijan with a proper visa in the future.
After tons of traveling, we eventually made it to London! Annnnd we were greeted with an immigration line that took us over an hour. Boo! But more about London coming next, stay tuned!
