This was not a great experience, but it is a great value.
United Airlines is a Star Alliance partner with Turkish Airlines, and you can book United flights for a lower points price via Turkish. To learn how to search for these flights check out this website and see the section titled “Booking United and other Star Alliance award flights”.
We booked a United Airlines flight through Turkish Airlines, and it was not easy to book two business class tickets using Turkish miles. We booked using Turkish Airlines instead of United Airlines since the points price was much lower. The points price to book a business class flight between LHR to SFO was 45k miles per person and $305 in taxes. The points price for United for the same flight was 62.5k miles points per person and $305 in taxes.
The Turkish Airlines website does not allow you to book two tickets on their website, so you must call.
Here is the phone number we called: 1-800-874-8875
After you go through the prompts and reach a customer service representative, then hope that they know how to book awards flight. Make sure to tell them the airports you are booking between, the airline you are booking on, the date, and whether you are booking a business or economy flight. Here is how our experience was:
First call: The representative said they could not find the flight requested in their system.
Second call: The representative said that we would have to call United to book the flight. I asked them if we would need to call United to use Turkish air miles, and they said yes.
Call to United: We decided to call United in case they referred us back to United. United confirmed that they could not book United flights with Turkish miles.
Third call: The representative was able to find the flights and book two tickets for us on a business class United Airlines flight for a total of 90k miles and $611.90 in taxes. The process took 30 minutes. We waited to transfer our points from Capital One to Turkish until after the representative confirmed the flights were available. The points transferred very quickly. Make sure you have the following information on hand: Turkish Airlines numbers for the individuals the ticket is for, passport numbers, your password for your Turkish Airlines account (this will be called your pin number), and your credit card. They will also ask for your contact information including phone number and email.
In conclusion, we booked two business class flights from LHR to SFO for 90k miles and $611, at the time of booking the cash price was $19,650.90. Note: This flight was booked on January 7th for a flight on January 24th. The reason we are booking so close to the departure date is due to our KLM flight booked via Virgin being rescheduled to a date that was two days later than the original departure date. Dealing with this two day change has been a big headache, Virgin emailed us about the change just a week ago.
