Booking Air India award space via the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles loyalty programme has been a hit and a miss for a long time. Except this time, all channels have been closed for over six weeks now, and there is no resort.

Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles troubles with Air India

Turkish Airlines has long not had access to Air India’s online reservations inventory, which has been attributed to Turkish Airlines’ IT Systems for the longest time. In fact, through early 2024, when the whole ecosystem was flush with people having miles from Axis Bank’s generosity, the go around to this was to call Turkish Airlines customer care or email them at any of their Indian reservation offices to have a redemption done.

However, the whole thing was believed to have been fixed when one could start seeing Air India’s availability on the Turkish Airlines website. But for months now, Air India seems to be the one with technical errors, which still need to be sorted.

So, Air India’s availability ends up showing on the Miles & Smiles website under the award ticket section, and you can go all the way to the Star Alliance redemption booking flow to meet this screen in the end.

The tricky part is that one cannot go through the process offline too. In February 2024, there were reports of Air India tickets being not confirmable, but they died away. They returned in September 2024. At first, it looked like one of those issues that would sort itself out. But, it turns out, that was not the case. I was trying to help a client of our award booking services with tickets, and we went the offline route after the screen we saw, and it turns out that Air India and Turkish Airlines still don’t have this issue resolved.

Here is the response that came back, and it clearly says the issues were at Air India’s end. Basically, tickets

So, it was no biggie. We fixed the issue by booking with some Air India miles, but the surcharges we paid were many times higher than what Turkish Airlines would have cost in this case. Meh! There was also an option to book it via some other Star Alliance carriers who would have gone through with the booking, so the issue is specific to Turkish Airlines.

But I’d love this issue to be solved for good because Star Alliance is all about sharing award space (amongst many other things), and this has been kept on hold for months at a go now. Till then, we wait.

Bottomline

Turkish Airlines’ Miles & Smiles has been having issues with accessing award space on Air India for a long while now. And this issue continues to be unresolved at the moment, which means, if you have Turkish Airlines miles, they are useless to try and book tickets on Air India.

Has anyone had any success booking on Air India recently via Turkish Airlines Miles and Smiles (post their revaluation)?

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