Your flight is delayed — what to do now

If your flight has just been delayed, the first useful thing isn’t a booking of any kind. It’s the desk with your own airline’s name on it.

Every scheduled departure from Antalya carries a duty of care on the airline — food and water while you wait, a hotel if the wait turns into a night — and it applies whoever’s flying you, Turkish or foreign, whatever the cause turns out to be. That’s separate from whether cash is owed on top, which depends on the cause and comes later on this page. Ask about care first. This page is about what to ask for, in order.

While you’re waiting

Go to your airline’s own desk, not to airport information. Vouchers, rebooking and hotel arrangements come from the carrier. Terminal staff can point you at the desk and do little else.

If you’re still on the aircraft, that already counts. Being held on board past a certain point creates a right to care on its own, separately from and often before the ordinary delay threshold for the flight overall — a fact from the regulator’s own guidance, not the headline regulation, and one that’s genuinely worth naming out loud if a crew member sounds unsure.

Ask specifically for the delay in writing, and for its cause if anyone will confirm it. Written confirmation is the document any later claim rests on, and it’s far easier to get standing at the desk than by email three weeks later.

Keep the boarding pass and the booking reference. Photograph both. People throw away exactly the piece of paper a claim needs.

Watch the departures board rather than an app. Status updates reach the board and the airline’s own screens first, and a delay extended in steps is a different situation from one long delay announced once.

Charge everything while you still can. If the phone dies, so does the booking reference, the boarding pass photo and your way of reaching anyone.

The obligation grows as the wait lengthens — drinks first, then a meal past a longer point, then, on the longest waits, a fuller allowance and the right to abandon the trip and be refunded instead. Two phone calls or messages are covered without a limit on how long they run. None of that depends on why the delay happened; the cause only starts to matter for the cash question further down.

If you’re staying the night

Ask the airline before you book anything yourself. Where the overnight stay is a direct result of the disruption and can’t reasonably be avoided, the room and the transport to it are the carrier’s to arrange. Rooms near a major airport fill fast once a wave of flights goes down, so this is the first question, not the third.

If nobody’s at the desk, book a room yourself and keep every receipt. A modest room booked promptly and claimed afterwards is a far stronger position than a night in the terminal and an argument later. Photograph the departures board showing your flight too — it dates the disruption.

This applies to a cancellation exactly as it applies to a delay. Nothing about the hotel obligation depends on whether the flight was pushed back or removed from the board entirely.

Keep your bags with you rather than assuming somewhere to leave them. What’s actually available inside the terminals covers the one narrow case where a locker exists — check it applies to your own situation before planning around it.

Whether money is owed as well

Care and cash are two different things, decided by two different questions. Care follows from the delay happening at all. Cash depends on why it happened and who’s flying you — and that second part surprises more people here than the first.

Causes that pay nothing. Weather, air traffic control decisions, security incidents, an aircraft grounded by an authority. These count as extraordinary circumstances, and no scheme pays out on them however long the wait ran.

Causes that can pay. A technical fault, a crewing problem, an aircraft that arrived late on the airline’s own rotation, denied boarding after an overbooked flight.

Every departure from here carries a Turkish claim on causes that can pay, whoever’s flying you — but a bigger, second claim on top depends specifically on the airline. Is compensation actually owed on your flight walks through exactly which carriers bring the larger claim and which don’t, because it genuinely isn’t the same answer for every airline flying out of this airport, including some of the biggest ones.

Go to the airline first if you decide to claim. It costs nothing, and a straightforward claim is often paid without an argument. A claims company is for when that stops working, in exchange for a share of whatever it recovers — worth knowing about before you sign rather than after.

If the flight is cancelled outright

The choice between a new flight and a refund is yours, not the airline’s. It may offer one or the other; you aren’t obliged to accept the one it prefers. Taking the refund means giving up the rerouting, so work out which you actually need before answering.

A schedule change announced with too little notice counts as a cancellation, not a small delay. If what you were told was a “reschedule” landed on you close to departure, Turkish guidance treats it the same as cancelling the flight outright — with the same choice between rerouting and a refund attached, not a lesser version of it.

Care continues either way. Meals and, where the night can’t be avoided, accommodation apply to a cancellation exactly as they apply to a delay.

Check what else the cancellation breaks. A pre-booked transfer for tonight, the first night of a resort stay, a car rental collection time — most of that can be moved for nothing if you tell the operator today and costs the full price if you wait until tomorrow.