Turkish Airlines has announced an increase of its YVR (Vancouver) ↔ IST (Istanbul) direct service from 3 to 5 weekly departures for the May–October summer schedule. This makes Vancouver Turkey's best-connected Western Canada origin alongside Toronto. The route was inaugurated in 2023 and has had consistent load factors above 80%.
For Canadian travelers, this is materially better: it brings westbound flexibility (departing YVR Mon/Wed/Thu/Sat/Sun) and shortens the typical roundtrip booking window. Our Turkey from Canada page now reflects the updated schedule.
Separately: Pegasus opened bookings for its new Istanbul SAW → Tirana (Albania) and Istanbul SAW → Tbilisi (Georgia) routes, which is useful for travelers combining Turkey with the Balkans or Caucasus on a single trip.
Lira-USD continues to hold at ~39.4. The 'where to stay in turkey' query in Google Search Console is sitting around 28 monthly impressions for our site — modest but trending up since the spring expansion went live.
Why this brief exists
Most travel content is written once and never updated. Turkey travel particularly suffers from this — flight schedules change, festival programs change, the lira's exchange rate moves week to week, and "what was true in 2023" is often outdated by the time a traveler reads it. This weekly brief exists to keep Where to Stay in Turkey honest. We publish only when there's something genuinely worth saying — typically once a week, sometimes twice when there's a route launch or notable currency move, occasionally none if the week was quiet.
If you find a brief useful and want it in your inbox, email us and we'll add you to the weekly digest. If you spot something we got wrong — a flight schedule changed, a festival date shifted, a price quoted here doesn't match what you saw on the ground — tell us. We update visibly.
Tags: canada, turkish-airlines, vancouver, pegasus, routes