Last updated: October 2026
We all flew home with Turkish Airlines, with a long connection in Istanbul. Turkish has a Turkish Airlines hotel service for long layovers. Mind the conditions, because they changed: today the airline publishes a minimum connection of 20 hours (the same in economy and business; what changes is the number of nights and the hotel category) and the benefit covers hotel and breakfast, with no transfers. Ours, in 2023, came with a shorter connection and included the meals and the transfer as well. The small print that has not changed: it only applies if there was no shorter connection on your route, even if that flight was full.
Our connection was something like seventeen to twenty-one hours. Before paying, I wrote to the Turkish Airlines office at Dubrovnik airport, and a representative confirmed by email that our ticket included the hotel. At Istanbul airport, at the hotel desk, they told me no: there had been another option with a shorter connection, sold out when we bought, but it existed. I showed them the email and asked, politely, for what they had promised in writing. They gave it to us, with a line I still do not understand: that they would take it out of the salary of the employee who had informed me wrongly.
They gave us the night in a hotel and the transfer. And the transfer matters more than it sounds.
Istanbul airport is the most beautiful airport I have ever been in, and it is new: it opened on 29 October 2018 and took over from the old Atatürk airport in a single 45-hour move in April 2019. The terminal covers 1.4 million square metres and is built for 90 million passengers a year. The scale is hard to describe. We landed and the plane taxied for about half an hour before reaching our gate. Half an hour rolling on the ground, after landing.
What the benefit includes is the hotel, the meals and the transfer. Not the tour: the free city tour is a different programme, Touristanbul, and you have to book that one separately.
The hotel was a comfortable three or four star with all meals included, and it was not downtown: it was out on the edge of the city. The minibus from the hotel to the city took two hours. Two actual hours, and that was not even to the historic centre. Depending on where you are going, count two to three hours between the airport and the city.
The other thing nobody tells you is the shuttle timetable. There were one or two runs a day to the airport. Breakfast at the hotel started at five in the morning and the van left at seven or eight, because the next one would not get me there in time. So I spent four or five hours inside the airport waiting for my flight. If you get this hotel, plan the trip back around the shuttle, not around your boarding time.
We got to the hotel after midday and we had one night, so we took a car into the city with Camila and went straight to Hagia Sophia, Ayasofya. It is overwhelming. It holds more history than some countries: Justinian built it between 532 and 537 as a Byzantine basilica, it became a mosque after the conquest of 1453, a museum by a 1934 decree that opened to the public in 1935, and a mosque again in July 2020. We paid an entrance fee — a cheap one — and to go in you have to cover up: the robe is sold right there at the door and it is compulsory for women. That was cheap too.
Inside I could walk all the way to the front and Camila stayed behind a line. I am telling you what we saw, not a rule: what is officially regulated is that the worship area and the visiting area are separate, not that women cannot enter. You still see the whole hall, because it is one enormous room. It was the first time I ran into a cultural difference that big, and it stayed with me.
One thing for anyone going now, because it changed after our trip: since January 2024 the tourist visit is paid (25 euros), you go in through a different door from worshippers, and the route runs along the upper gallery.
Then we walked to the Blue Mosque, and there we arrived right at the call to prayer. We could not go in. The official rule is this: entry is free, but the mosque closes to visitors for the midday and afternoon prayers, from half an hour before the call until a quarter of an hour after it ends; on Fridays it only opens to visitors at 2.30pm. And the street was something else. People in suits, people in work clothes, everyone dropping what they were doing and half running to get there in time. We had heard the call to prayer in Mostar, but not like this.
We finished at the bazaar next door, which is exactly what you see in photos: spices, paintings, mugs, magnets, someone selling you something every three metres. We bought nothing, and not because we did not want to: our checked bags had gone through to São Paulo and we were carrying only backpacks. Then a car back to the hotel, dinner included, breakfast at five and the airport.
The stories run in order: this is what happened around this one.
