Turkish Airlines A330-300 Business Class Review (Istanbul-Bangkok)

Turkish Airlines is one of my favourite airlines to fly with. That’s in no small part thanks to its excellent food – both at its Istanbul Airport lounges, and on board.

I fly quite a lot between Australia and Europe. As I’ve previously written about, I try to make these long trips comfortable and more affordable by buying Business Class tickets between Asia and Europe. This can work out to be very good value. I then book separate flights between Australia and Asia, often buying tickets in Economy or using my points to fly Business.

On a recent trip, I found a well-priced Turkish Airlines Business fare from Europe to Asia. I used the outbound leg of this ticket to get out of Europe at the end of one trip, then used the return leg of that ticket to get back to Europe several months later. As an added bonus, these flights also earned me enough status miles to extend my Miles&Smiles status after getting a Turkish Airlines status match.

In this review, I’ll share my experience flying in Turkish Airlines Business Class on the long-haul sector from Istanbul to Asia.

While Turkish Airlines flies a wide variety of different aircraft types and configurations, this particular flight to Bangkok was on a long-haul Airbus A330-300 fitted with lie-flat Business seats. (Note that Turkish Airlines also has a sub-fleet of A330s with recliner Business seats, which it mainly uses on short and medium-haul flights.)

Flight Details

Flight number	TK68
Origin	Istanbul (IST)
Destination	Bangkok (BKK)
Aircraft type	Airbus A330-300 (long-haul configuration)
Class of travel	Business
Seat number	4J
On-time performance	We arrived on time
Star rating

The route

Flight Cost

In total, I paid AUD3,214 for an open-jaw Turkish Airlines Business Class ticket with the following routing:

• Tallinn-Istanbul-Bangkok for the outbound leg
• Singapore-Istanbul-Helsinki for the return leg

Airport Experience

After flying into Istanbul from Tallinn, I had a couple of hours at Istanbul Airport before my connecting flight departed to Bangkok. So, after landing, I headed for the Turkish Airlines Business Lounge.

In my opinion, this is up there with some of the best Business Class airport lounges in the world. It’s a large, airy space above the main terminal with lots of seating, amenities and entertainment options.

The lounge provides lockers to store your bags.

But the highlight of this lounge is the delicious Turkish food. There are numerous live cooking stations where you can get freshly-prepared plated Turkish dishes. The pide oven is especially popular!

There are also several self-service buffet areas with additional food, several fridges with self-service drinks, and a coffee station serving traditional Turkish coffee. You can get beer, wine and spirits too, but these are a little bit more “hidden”.

There are meeting rooms available within the lounge. If your connection time is over 8 hours, and subject to availability, you could even get your own a private suite with a bed in it. And if you need to get some ironing done, there’s a complimentary ironing service too.

Or, if you have a bit of spare time, why not visit the museum within the lounge?

In fact, this lounge is so ridiculous (in a good way) that there’s a flying simulator and a golf simulator.

Finally, there are dozens of showers available. That said, the wait time for a shower can get quite long during peak periods. So, if you would like a shower, I’d suggest adding yourself to the waitlist as soon as you arrive in the lounge.

I just had enough time for a shower on this occasion, which was good as the lounge was admittedly quite warm. But the wait time on another visit to this lounge was so long that my flight would have already departed before a shower became available.

Once it was time to board, I made the (long) walk out to my gate. Boarding was a straightforward process, with Business Class called first.

The Hard Product

With 25 different aircraft configurations in its large and varied fleet, Turkish Airlines has quite a mix of different Business Class products and layouts. On this occasion, I was flying on a long-haul Airbus A330 with lie-flat seats in a 2-2-2 layout.

This is a bit of an “old school” seating layout, which comes with the obvious disadvantage that the passenger on the window seat cannot directly access the aisle. There’s plenty of space for the window seat passenger to get out when the aisle seat isn’t reclined, but it’s not so easy if they are fully reclined and sleeping.

There’s no doubt that these seats lack privacy. But there is at least a physical divider between each seat pair that you can choose to extend if you don’t want to talk to your neighbour.

That said, I found the Turkish Airlines A330-300 Business Class seat itself very comfortable, and slept well on it. And one advantage of this layout, compared to more modern Business configurations where every passenger gets direct aisle access, is that there’s unlimited space for your legs. You don’t need to fit them into a narrow footwell while sleeping.

There’s a decent amount of storage space around the seat, including a box below the TV screen which is big enough to fit your shoes or a small backpack. And there’s an AC charging outlet beside the seat.

In-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi

There’s a large TV screen on the back of the seat in front. Turkish Airlines offers a very decent selection of movies, TV shows, music and games on its in-flight entertainment system, so I didn’t get bored. But I do think there might be a bit more content if you’re flying on one of Turkish’s Airbus A350s or Boeing 777s.

There are two external cameras showing a live feed of the view outside, which you can watch on the entertainment system. Normally, Turkish Airlines also makes several live TV channels available – but they didn’t seem to be working on this particular flight.

The Turkish Airlines A330-300 is Wi-Fi enabled. Every Business Class passenger gets 1GB of free internet usage, and Miles&Smiles Elite members flying Business can use unlimited data. When it worked, I found the Wi-Fi quite fast – but it did cut in and out periodically.

The Soft Product

When I arrived at my seat, a pillow, blanket, slippers and high quality Denon noise-cancelling headphones were already waiting for me. The bag containing the slippers doubles up as a bag you can store your own shoes in during the flight – a nice touch.

Unfortunately, my headphones didn’t actually work. The airline only loaded one pair of headphones for each Business Class seat, and the cabin was full, so the crew brought me a pair of headphones from Economy.

Before take-off, the friendly cabin crew handed out very well-stocked Ferragamo amenity kits.

This was followed by welcome drinks – a choice of water, raspberry juice, freshly squeezed orange juice or a lemon mint drink, served in proper glassware.

Food & drinks

In addition to the flight attendants, Turkish Airlines has a dedicated in-flight chef on board. Before we departed from Istanbul, he introduced himself and took my meal order for the flight. As you can see, the menu was very extensive!

Turkish Airlines offers “dine on demand”, so you can order anything you want from the menu at any time. That’s a great service.

Given the departure time of 1.35am, and having already eaten a bit in the lounge, I probably should have gone straight to sleep after take-off and opted just to eat towards the end of the flight. Instead, I chose to have a full meal after take-off.

In hindsight, the meal service ended up being quite drawn out, and there was a lot of food. By the time I finished eating, it was already around 4am in Istanbul and I was struggling to eat any more food – or to stay awake. (That’s not a criticism of Turkish Airlines, by the way – this was very much my own fault for choosing to partake in the extensive dinner service!)

There was a reasonably comprehensive wine list for Business Class:

And this was the selection of non-alcoholic beverages:

After take-off, and recognising that some people just wanted to sleep, the smiling crew were quick to come through the cabin to make up everyone’s beds. This involved adding an extra mattress topper to the seat, and providing a large blanket and pillowcase.

Next, the crew handed out hot towels.

Around an hour after take-off, I received my first drink – a glass of the Sulva Sur 2021 red wine, which I liked a lot. This came with a bowl of warm mixed nuts.

As always on Turkish Airlines, the food was fresh, plentiful and tasted great! I especially love that the food is unapologetically Turkish – a cuisine famous for its flavour.

I started the meal with the Turkish meze plate:

The chicken with my main course was excellent – juicy, smoky and full of flavour.

I finished off the meal with some Turkish desserts:

Around two hours and 15 minutes after take-off, the main dinner service concluded and the crew switched off the cabin lights.

For some reason, the crew had set up a full bar at the start of the flight at the front of the Business cabin. Strangely, this was directly in front of seats 1D and 1E, rather than in the galley. During the middle of the flight, this bar was also stocked with snacks like fresh fruit, popcorn and Turkish delight (lokum).

I slept very well until the lights came back on almost three hours before landing. At this point, the cabin crew handed out another round of hot towels and started the pre-landing breakfast service.

Given the flight time of around 9.5 hours, that left less than 4.5 hours to actually utilise the lie-flat bed between the two meal services. I do think the breakfast service should have started later, to allow more time for passengers to sleep. By the time the breakfast service was over, there was still a whole hour and 45 minutes left before landing!

Nonetheless, when I received my breakfast around 2 hours and 15 minutes before landing, it was very good.

After some well-presented yoghurt, fruit and granola to start, the main course with breakfast was a delicious Turkish version of Eggs Benedict.

Before landing, the cabin crew collected everyone’s headphones and handed out chocolate-coated Turkish delights.