Hotels & Accommodation (Guest Rights)

In food poisoning cases, expert witness findings carry great weight. Depending on the type and onset of the poisoning, something you ate or drank before arriving at the hotel could also be the cause, or the expert may conclude that the hospital report from that day cannot establish the source. Check whether other guests filed similar complaints about the hotel for the dates of your stay — at the very least, try to show you were not the only person affected. Legally, however, unless your agency or one of its employees actually prepared and served the food, the agency cannot be held liable for an incident that occurred inside the hotel due to the hotel's negligence.

Since the booking confirmation is a document issued by the agency, the agency must provide the air conditioning even if the fault is not its own. You can request a move to an air-conditioned room, a discount, or a full refund. If, say, you are staying in Antalya in mid-July, the lack of air conditioning may make it plainly unreasonable to expect you to put up with the contract as it is, so you can negotiate over the accommodation price or consider an upgrade to a higher room category. If the agency or hotel makes you an offer during this process, be sure to check the (advisory) Kütahya Chart before evaluating it. Under that chart, you can claim a refund of 20% of the total accommodation price for non-working air conditioning — although, as noted, a court or consumer arbitration committee may treat a broken air conditioner at the height of summer in Antalya as a more serious defect deserving more.

Yes — provided the property is registered as a tourism residence, you can rent it for holiday purposes. Note that tourism rentals are capped at 100 days; a rental longer than 100 days will not be treated as a tourism rental. Also bear in mind that Booking.com does not hold a Turkish travel agency licence, so it cannot serve Turkish citizens for domestic bookings within Türkiye.

Contact the hotel or your agency and submit a written request. In it, state that under Turkish data protection law (KVKK) the details of the relevant bookings may be sent, unredacted, to your spouse's email address. You and your spouse can submit a single joint request, or separate requests with consistent content.

Yes. Under Article 2 of the Identity Notification Law No. 1774, your identity details are transmitted to the nearest law-enforcement unit through the identity notification system. The rule about payments under 5,000 lira concerns whether your Turkish ID number appears on e-archive invoices — it has nothing to do with the accommodation facility recording your identity.

No. Unless the listing explicitly says gala dinners are included, they are not part of the all-inclusive price. If you want to attend the gala dinner, contact the agency or the hotel organising it beforehand and find out exactly what is and isn't included in the price.

No. Public-sector social facilities and guesthouses are inspected by their own parent institutions under those institutions' internal audit procedures.

How much did the missing projector actually affect your event? Based on that, you can claim compensation or a refund. But be careful: if you went ahead, used the hall, finished the meeting and raised no objection beforehand, obtaining compensation becomes harder. So even if you do proceed, it is important to send the hotel an email and a message that amount to a reservation of rights before or while you use the venue.

No. This very common situation arises from a lack of enforcement. Under the Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities, a boutique hotel licence requires at least 10 rooms. If you're staying at a five-room "boutique hotel", you are most likely in a stylishly designed property that is actually licensed as a pension (guesthouse).

Your pet's size matters, as does having a microchip and ID. If the voucher or contract set no pet size limit, refusing your dog is an unfair commercial practice — you can go both to the Consumer Arbitration Committee and to the Ministry of Trade. But if the limits were stated on the website when you booked and you went ahead thinking "so what if my dog is 3 kg over", you may end up in the wrong. We recommend consulting a lawyer first and giving them the full, honest picture.

It doesn't have to be there. Under the Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities, in-room internet is mandatory at 4- and 5-star hotels — not at 3-star hotels.

Under the regulation, bedrooms must be designed to receive natural light — a window is a minimum requirement, so no, such a room cannot legally be a hotel room. Consumer arbitration committees may decline to order a refund for a service that has been used and consumed, but we suggest trying anyway. In any event, our advice is to complain both to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and to the Ministry of Trade.

Under Turkish legislation, if no check-out time is specified and there is no information about it anywhere, check-out is at 12:00 noon.

No. Except in apart-hotels and pensions, you cannot cook in your room. Moreover, under the regulation, if you bring your own food and drink into the hotel instead of consuming what the hotel provides, the hotelier may charge an additional fee.

Since guests may only bring animals into a hotel with the hotelier's express permission, hotels also set the scope of that permission themselves. Even where permission is given, animals may not be taken into shared areas — dining rooms in particular.