Ankara Travel for Travel

By Margaret Sheard

I don’t do a lot of travelling nowadays but when I do I have always found the staff at Ankara Travel to be very helpful and ready to give advise regarding my intended journey or holiday.  They did a great job for the recent Royal British Legion, Kyrenia Branch, trip to Gallipoli and Troy, which was a very enjoyable experience and one I would like to do again maybe independently next time so that more time can be spent at Gallipoli as there is so much to see there.

I suppose it is inevitable that people visiting various businesses really know nothing about the people they are dealing with and for this reason Chris and I paid a visit to Ankara Travel to get a bit more information about the people who do the work behind the scenes and the company itself.

Ankara Travel was established in Ankara Street, Limassol, South Cyprus in 1971.It was a 3-storey building which was built by the family and they started the travel agency there.  With the intervention by Turkey in 1974 and the movement of people between the North and South of Cyprus, the family had to leave Limassol and they settled in Girne to resume their business from the north part of the island.

So from 1974, Ankara Travel was established in North Cyprus where they have continued to give excellent service for the traveller.The building they occupy was refurbished in June 2007 and we were told that it took 9 days to complete, the results are a very well laid out and comfortable office both for the staff and clients alike.

The business is headed by Cenk Turmen, and he has a staff of 4 very able people.There is Radiye Oday who has been with the company for 8 yearsŞeniz Halford who has 5 years service,  Soydaş Altugan has worked at Ankara Travel for 4 years and last but not least Eren Seferber who has also been with the company for 4 years.   Eren has always been our main contact at Ankara Travel, he speaks excellent English and is very knowledgeable as far as geographical locations are concerned, probably as a result of his extensive travelling when he took 2 years out to visit the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, Nepal, India, Egypt, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.As well as Eren, both Şeniz and Soydaş have excellent English

Şeniz recalled the past days when everything was done by hand and the issuing of tickets which all had to be hand-written was a painstaking task which at the end of the day saw her going home suffering from “writer’s cramp”.

Of course those days are long gone and it is so much easier now to arrange bookings, although I would think, like me, it took people quite a while to accept that you would arrive at the airport without a ticket and hoped there was a note of your booking on the computer and you would be on the flight!  but for the staff of Ankara Travel, the job of organising travel for their clients became so much easier even with the increase in the numbers of people who like globe-trotting.

Ankara are licensed to issue tickets for all airlines, they are IATA approved and can tailor a holiday to suit individual requirements, so whether it be a flight only, a package holiday, or a few days in Istanbul, they are happy to cater for whatever is needed.Why not think about a short break to Cappadocia or perhaps somewhere further afield like New York, Sydney, Paris or maybe a cruise. Personally, I have to admit that I have not yet visited Istanbul, other than for  flight connections, and this is certainly on my list of places to visit so maybe a trip to Ankara Travel will be on the books in the near future to see what they have to tempt me.

Eren said they have details of some of the 2013 flights to London and no doubt there are some people already thinking about a trip to the UK next year.

Ankara Travel is open Monday to Friday – 8am to 1pm and 2pm to 5.30pm and on Saturdays from 8.30am to 2pm.

For more information from Ankara Travel,  email tickets@ankaratravelagency.com.

We so enjoyed the trip to Gallipoli and Troy and wrote a day by day diary about the trip.   Visitors to this website can read the accounts and see and enjoy the pictures.

Click here –  Day 1     Day 2     Day 3     Day 4     Day 5   to see the RBL trip to Canakkale including Troy and Gallipoli.

To put you in the mood for a holiday do watch the video below and remembre those days of yesteryear.