What Turkish and international rules actually say

Three separate things can go wrong with a flight out of a Turkish airport — a long delay, a seat you were bumped from, a class you were moved out of — and one regulation covers all three, on every departure, whoever is flying you. This page is about what the rule itself says, structured the way the regulation itself is: who it covers, what each scenario is owed, and where a complaint actually has to go. If you want to know whether a specific delay is worth pursuing and how much, flight compensation is the page built for that.

What the regulation covers, and what it doesn’t

Turkey’s SHY-YOLCU regulation attaches to the airport, not to the passenger’s nationality or the airline’s home market — with one asymmetry worth knowing before anything else. A Turkish carrier is covered flying into a Turkish airport and out of one. A foreign carrier is covered only flying out. An arrival on a foreign airline sits outside this rule entirely, even though the same regulation covers the return leg on the same ticket.

Two conditions decide whether you’re inside the rule at all, and both are easy to miss.

You need a confirmed booking and to have shown up on time — checked in by the stated time or, failing that, no later than a set number of minutes before the flight was due to leave. If the flight was cancelled rather than delayed, this condition doesn’t apply; you don’t need to have checked in for a flight that never operated.

The airline needs your contact details, and needs them correct. If you didn’t give them, or gave the wrong ones, the airline is released from some of what it would otherwise owe — a condition the European rule most sites default to doesn’t have, and worth knowing if you booked through a third party that didn’t pass your details on.

One place the Turkish rule is wider than the European one: it covers free and discounted tickets, and miles redemptions. The European regulation excludes exactly this group. If you flew on a reward booking or a heavily discounted fare, you are still inside the Turkish rule on a departure from Turkey.

Delayed flights

The obligation grows in steps as the wait lengthens — first meals and a way to contact people, then, past a longer threshold, a full refund of the ticket and a flight back to where you started if you no longer want to continue. A domestic flight and an international one are on different distance and payment scales, and a domestic delay triggers care sooner than an international one does.

The compensation threshold is narrower than most readers expect. It only applies to delays caused by technical or operational reasons — not to every delay of the right length. A delay caused by weather or an air traffic control decision does not trigger it, however long it runs.

Advance notice can remove the claim entirely. An airline that tells you about a schedule change far enough ahead of the flight is not treated the same as one that tells you at the gate — check the table for how much notice counts.

A comparable replacement flight can reduce the amount rather than cancel it. If the airline gets you there within a set margin of your original arrival time on an alternative flight, the compensation is reduced rather than withheld entirely — a middle outcome the European rule handles differently.

Denied boarding

If a flight is oversold, the airline has to ask for volunteers before it can remove anyone by force, and volunteers are entitled to whatever is agreed with them at the gate, on top of the ordinary care obligations — but not the standard compensation, which volunteering trades away. Passengers who are removed involuntarily keep the standard compensation in full, calculated on the same scale as a long delay.

There is no separate, smaller figure for denied boarding under Turkish law — it refers back to the same delay compensation structure. What denied boarding adds is a choice most delays don’t offer: to be rerouted or to be refunded, decided by you rather than the airline.

Downgrading and upgrading

Put in a lower class than you paid for, and the airline owes you the fare difference back plus a percentage on top, scaled by the length of the flight — a materially better position than the European rule, which gives only the percentage without the underlying refund. Put in a better seat than you booked, and the airline cannot charge you extra for it: no surcharge applies to an involuntary upgrade.

Making a claim: the order that matters

The airline first, always. The regulation requires it, and it is also the fastest route to being paid — a straightforward claim is often settled without a fight. Write to the airline naming the flight, the date, and what you are claiming.

Turkey’s civil aviation authority, SHGM, second — and only after the airline has had its window to respond and either failed to or given an unsatisfactory answer. Complaints filed before that window closes skip a step the process is built around. SHGM runs an online portal for exactly this, separate from any complaint made directly to the airline.

Turkish civil aviation law sets an outer limit for bringing a claim to court, running for years rather than months — separate from and considerably longer than the airline’s own response window, and not shortened by missing it.

Currency: why a lira figure on another site is probably wrong

The regulation sets its amounts in euros, not in lira, and converts them at the Turkish central bank’s selling rate on the day compensation is actually paid — not the day you bought the ticket, and not the day the flight was delayed. That detail changed a few years back, and it matters in a currency that moves as much as the lira does: any fixed lira figure quoted on a page written before the change, or without checking which date it’s using, is very likely wrong by now.

Where to next

Is your flight actually worth claiming walks through which airline and which route pay what, in practice. If it’s a bag rather than a flight, baggage rights is a different treaty with different deadlines and a different amount at stake.