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I am looking to purchase tickets from London to Tbilisi for this summer on Turkish Airlines (for reasons out of scope for this question, this needs to be Turkish Airlines).

When I search on Turkish Airlines web site, I am offered various connection options, with different first and second legs of the connecting flight from LHR to TBS. There seems to be no way to select individual flights - only specific combinations. For example, there are these flights:

LHR to IST -- 11:30 - 17:20
IST to TBS -- 19:30 - 22:45.

This is a very reasonable connection time of just over two hours. However the airline's website doesn't give me an option of choosing these flights. There are definitely seats available for these flights, as I do have an option of picking different combinations including one or the other of these two flights, but not the two together.

I tried looking on other sites, including the usual expedia, kayak, etc. as well as on ITA matrix - no luck.

Of course, I could always book these on two separate tickets, however this isn't a viable option - I need all flights to be on the same ticket.

Is there any reason why they wouldn't offer me this option? And, more importantly, is there any way to choose individual flights for my connection?

P.S. I haven't tried the phone booking yet - possibly they would be able to do this for me.

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  • 1
    Could you also list the dates and the flight numbers? It would be easier to 'debug' then.
    – JonathanReez
    Feb 28, 2017 at 9:01

2 Answers 2

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There's no IST to TBS flight at 7:30PM. At least not on any day I can find. There is a daily SAW to TBS flight at 7:30PM between 03/26/17 and 10/28/17 and for that flight Turkish prescribes a four-five hour minimum connection time from IST, rightly so.

The Turkish website is misleading you (and no, the little (i) under IST doesn't display this, only the full details do):

enter image description here

Another Turkish website -- I landed here from Google Flights:

enter image description here

this site provides a lot less warnings.

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  • Oh! That would explain it! I suppose they did change this flight not too long ago, as I do remember using this connection in the summer of 2015.
    – Aleks G
    Feb 28, 2017 at 13:37
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A flight from London to Istanbul takes approximately 4 hours. The time difference between London and Istanbul is 3 hours. So the flight leaving at 11.30 should arrive at approximately 18.30. At least Skyscanner gives me this rough timetable. It might be possible that some of the sites you use still have the wrong timezones, as Turkey quite recently changed their timezone.

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    There's a problem with this theory: Turkish Airlines prescribes a one hour minimum connection time for this pair of flights at the IST airport so even if OP were landing at 18:20 (which, by the way, would be a very serious and practically unheard of error) even then TK would allow the booking. As you will see below, the problem is that the connection is not in the IST airport!
    – user4188
    Feb 28, 2017 at 10:01

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