Turkish Airlines’ flights are riddled with bedbugs, passengers say

The airline later offered Myers a 10% discount on future flights — valid through the end of the year, he said.

When she tried to follow up with the airline, she said Turkish Airlines representatives told her they could not find her reservation – then suddenly said they found it and hung up the phone. 

Planes must be brought to maintenance centers, and air carriers have to make the decision of whether to cancel future flights, Rob Tuck, president of aviation consulting firm Jet Research, told the Times.

She took photos of 13 bug bites on her skin after the flight.

In October, Matthew Myers, 28, and his girlfriend were en route from Istanbul to San Francisco on a Turkish Airlines flight. The passenger next to Myers tapped him on the shoulder to alert him that there were bedbugs crawling on the seats and falling from the plane cabin, he said.

“Before departure, I noticed a bug crawling on my blanket,” she told the Times. “When I found another on the pillow, I realized it was a bedbug.”

People suffering from bedbugs often have to seal all their belongings in airtight plastic bags and fumigate their homes multiple times.

Later in October, Kristin Bourgeois, 37, said she saw bedbugs crawling around the plane during her 10-hour flight from the D.C. area to Istanbul.

A flight attendant on the plane got rid of the insect, but dismissed Titcombe’s concerns that it was a bedbug, she said.

The airline later offered her 5,000 frequent flier miles.

“Multiple passengers were asking to move seats after discovering bugs,” Myers told the Times. 

Turkish Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After filing a complaint, Turkish Airlines demanded via email that Bourgeois submit “a medical report approved by a doctor with signature, stamp and date,” according to the Times.

Afterwards, she said she checked her flight history and saw it had been removed from the airline’s app.

Another Turkish Airlines passenger said they were bitten by bedbugs during an August flight. Despite sharing photos of the bites with the carrier’s help desk, the passenger received an email saying that Turkish Airlines could not find any complaints from their flight and that their aircrafts are “disinfected regularly,” according to a screenshot of the email posted on X.

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