- Passengers on Turkish Airlines flights reportedly found bedbugs nestling in their seats, blankets, and pillows, and crawling along the ceiling of the cabin. When passengers raised those concerns to flight crew and customer service reps, they allegedly got little response.
Several Turkish Airlines flights reportedly had bedbugs, according to passengers.
First reported in the New York Times, the allegations included bedbugs crawling on seats, in blankets, and nestling on pillows on multi-hour journeys. Passengers on one apparently hellish trip said they saw bedbugs dropping from the ceiling of the cabin. The incidents spanned from March to October of last year on flights from several continents.
During a 10-hour journey from Johannesburg to Istanbul, Patience Titcombe, a 36-year-old passenger from Phoenix, said she found a bedbug writhing on her seat when she got up.
Several of the passengers said that when they alerted Turkish Airlines staff to the presence of bedbugs, their concerns were dismissed.
“I almost flicked it away,” Titcombe told the New York Times. “But my friend stopped me and said, ‘That’s a bedbug.’”
Bedbugs are highly transmissible—leaping from person to person and causing itchy welts—and they feed on human blood. The tiny vampiric parasites are mostly active at night and recently wreaked havoc across France. An infestation can be expensive and mentally anguishing to remediate. Chow-Yang Lee, a professor of urban entomology at the University of California, Riverside, wrote last year that bedbugs have infiltrated every tier of society and cost billions annually to treat.
As for Titcombe, she reported the bedbug sighting to an attendant on her flight, who, she says, waved away her concerns. When Titcombe followed up with customer service afterward, her warnings fell on deaf ears, she said.
Later the same year, two passengers on another flight also discovered bedbugs. Matthew Myers, 28, and his girlfriend were on a 13 and a half hour flight from Istanbul to San Francisco when another passenger alerted them to the presence of bedbugs. In this case, the insects kept dropping from the ceiling of the cabin. “Multiple passengers were asking to move seats after discovering bugs,” Myers said in an interview with the Times.
Myers said he raised the concern to a flight attendant, who told him they filed an official report with the airline.
Turkish Airlines said it prioritizes the safety and comfort of its passengers and that aircraft are “regularly cleaned and thoroughly sanitized before every flight,” according to a statement from media relations senior vice president Yahya Üstün. The airline added that it took complaints “seriously” and that bedbugs were not out of the ordinary in crowded areas.
“Bedbug cases are a general issue occasionally encountered in public spaces, including aircraft,” Üstün said.
Bedbugs thrive in clothes, mattresses, couches, and deep cushy spaces. Because they are as small as apple seeds even when fully grown and live in everyday items, they can spread rapidly. After seeing the bedbugs on her flight, Titcombe took pains to make sure they didn’t infest her home and family.
“I had to strip down at the airport and change clothes because I have kids—what if I brought bedbugs home?” She said.
While most often associated with houses and apartments in large cities, they are not entirely uncommon on airplanes either, according to Reuven Noyman, owner of NYC Steam Cleaning, which offers cleaning services for private planes.
“They’re more common on planes than people like to admit,” Noyman said.
Bedbugs can be extremely difficult to get rid of, often requiring fumigation in order to eliminate an infestation. However, planes can’t be easily fumigated because the chemicals that kill bedbugs often come in powder form, which could get stuck in the electrical wiring in the cabin and cause damage, Noyman said. Instead, to get rid of bedbugs on a plane, Noyman noted, it’s necessary to steam-power wash the upholstery on the chairs.
“We basically use vapor steamers [so] we’re able to spray fabric,” Noyman said. “The low content of moisture lets us use it on a variety of things, even electronics, without damaging it.”
Based on Noyman’s estimates, the cost to steam-wash the planes where passengers reported bedbugs could be thousands of dollars. The Johannesburg to Istanbul trip, where Titcombe found the bedbug scuttling on her seat, is made by Airbus A350-900 planes, which seat between 300 to 350, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. Cleaning all the seats on those planes could cost between $10,500 to $12,250, based on estimates. Meanwhile, the Istanbul to San Francisco flight Myers took involves the larger Boeing 777-300ER, which seats around 396 people, per FlightAware, bringing the total estimated cost for that plane to roughly $13,860.
Other common insects found on planes are moths, like those that inhabit unopened closets, said Noyman. On rare occasions Noyman said he has found common household pests such as mice and cockroaches, which are attracted to the food found in a plane’s kitchen. However, when mice manage to escape the cabin and wind up in the hull of the plane, that’s when things can get even more unpleasant, according to Noyman.
“You find mice that are dead,” Noyman said. “You put a mouse in the bottom of the plane, and it’s gonna freeze and die.”
Update, Jan. 3, 2025: This article has been updated to include a statement from Turkish Airlines senior vice president Yahya Üstün.