How to Give Your Flight Number Correctly

Where to find it

On the airline confirmation it is usually in the top line, next to the departure and arrival airports. On a boarding pass it sits near the top, often labelled "Flight". The form is always the same: two letters for the airline, then three or four digits — XQ 1234, say, or TK 1055. Whether you type it with a space or without makes no difference.

Three things that are not flight numbers, all of which appear on the same confirmation: your tour operator booking reference, the airline's six-character booking code, and the ticket number. None of them identifies a flight.

Connecting flights: the final leg is the one that counts

Fly to Antalya via Istanbul and you have two flight numbers on one booking. We need the second — the flight you actually land on at your destination airport. The reason is practical: your bags and your arrival time follow that flight, not the first one.

Give us the first leg instead and, at worst, the driver is at the terminal hours early tracking a flight that lands at a different airport altogether. This shows up most clearly on flights to Ercan Airport: services there route through a Turkish airport, and only the final leg says anything about when you reach northern Cyprus.

Codeshares: two numbers for one flight

Some flights are sold by one airline and operated by another. The ticket then carries the selling airline's number while the airport and the departure boards use the operating airline's. Either works for us. If both appear on your confirmation, give the operating carrier's — that is the number the flight actually runs under.

Why it is worth being precise here

With the right number we can see on the day whether your aircraft is running to time, and dispatch against the actual landing rather than the booked hour. Waiting time caused by a flight delay is not charged. If you land early, the pickup moves forward in the same way — which happens more often than people expect.

The reverse is also true: without a usable flight number we work from the time you typed in. That is fine on a punctual flight, and becomes a problem on precisely the day it matters.

Adding it later, and changing it

If there was no flight number when you booked, simply send it on. The same goes for any later change: a new number, a rebooked flight, a different arrival day. A short message with your name, your travel date and the new number is enough, and you get a confirmation back. Ways to reach us are on the contact page.

Common questions