Turkish Airlines

1. The client

Turkish Airlines is the national airline of Turkey, founded in 1933, which grew from domestic flights to an extensive international network; its first international route, Ankara to Istanbul to Athens, opened in 1947 [1]. Today it operates a fleet of more than 500 passenger and cargo aircraft, made up of the Boeing 737 and Airbus A319/A320/A321 families alongside long haul aircraft such as the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350-900, and it serves more than 350 destinations worldwide, one of the widest route networks anywhere [1].

The company has been a member of the Star Alliance since 2008, a position that places it alongside other major global airlines and extends its reach through code-share agreements and hub connectivity [1]. With a central hub in Istanbul, one of the busiest air nodes in the world, Turkish Airlines handles a large volume of passengers and digital transactions, bookings, check-in, trip management, which makes its digital platforms a business critical component rather than a simple auxiliary tool.

Financially, the company reported total revenue of 22.7 billion dollars in 2024, up 8.2% year on year, and a profit of 2.4 billion dollars for the same year [2]. The shareholder structure reflects a partial privatisation: Turkiye Wealth Fund holds approximately 49% of the company, with the remaining shares freely traded on the Istanbul exchange [3]. Those figures place Turkish Airlines among the large global airlines, with the resources and technical project requirements that come with that scale.

The digital project relevant to this engagement is Companion, the mobile app Turkish Airlines launched publicly in September 2019, available on iOS and Android, designed as an extension on the passenger’s phone for the onboard entertainment platform, Planet [4]. The app let passengers build their content playlist ahead of the flight and, onboard, connect their phone to the seatback screen in front of them to control playback from there, while their own device stayed free for the flight map or other content, effectively a second screen for the entertainment experience [4]. At launch, the app was available on more than 100 aircraft in the fleet [4].

2. Context of the engagement

Our team was one of the subcontractor teams involved in building the Companion app. The internal project note places our involvement in 2018, a year before the app’s public launch in September 2019, a timing gap that is normal for a project of this scale, where development, testing and integration with the onboard Planet platform precede the launch date by many months. We do not force an exact date of involvement; we cite 2018 as part of the development period before launch, not as the launch date itself.

It is important to state our role precisely: we were not the sole or lead developer of the app, but one of the subcontractor teams contributing to the project, alongside other teams involved in the wider development effort.

That distinction matters for the honesty of our portfolio. A digital project for an international airline of this size is almost always delivered by several teams, internal and external, working in parallel on different components. Our role was that of a subcontractor within a larger structure, not that of a single solution provider.

3. What we did

Within this project, the team contributed to the development of components of the Companion app then under construction, as part of a coordinated effort across several subcontractor teams. This kind of engagement typically means fitting an external team’s work into a development flow set by the client or by a lead integrator, meeting technical and process standards imposed by the project, and delivering the assigned components in parallel with other teams working on other parts of the same app.

In the records we keep about this project we have no further detail on the exact modules, the specific technologies or the volume of work assigned to our team relative to the other subcontractor teams, and we do not reconstruct them here. What we can confirm is our participation, during the development period before the 2019 launch, in this project, in a subcontractor role.

4. Results

The engagement notes contain no figures specific to this project, so we state no quantified results. The value of this engagement for our portfolio lies in the experience of having taken part, even as a subcontractor, in the development of a public mobile app for a major international airline, a working context with higher technical and process standards than those of an average client, precisely because of the end client’s scale of operation and the number of teams coordinated simultaneously on the same project.

5. Services involved

A similar project run by our agency today would sit within the service line dedicated to digital product development:

• Mobile apps, for the app component development itself, native or cross-platform, including integrations with hardware or onboard systems of the kind used by an entertainment platform.
• Custom web apps, for any back office or portal components associated with a platform of this complexity.
• Performance, security & maintenance, for the technical standards required by an app used by a large volume of users, aboard an international fleet.

Sources

1. Turkish Airlines, Wikipedia
2. Turkish Airlines reports profit of $2.4 billion in 2024, Gulf News
3. Who Owns Turkish Airlines Company?, MatrixBCG
4. Turkish Airlines launches Companion app for IFE platform, Future Travel Experience