The Best Holiday In Istanbul 2022

If you’ve been searching for an affordable holiday location and discovered Turkey and are now going down a rabbit hole trying to plan an ideal trip well, ladies and gents, this blog post is for you.

Asides from its vibrant and picturesque architecture, Istanbul has a lot more to give. I visited the city in the early days of December and it was one of the best decisions I made last year. You can follow my journey on my YouTube channel because I made sure to document it. However, I had to do personal research to find out how to plan my trip and I foraged through various websites and multiple YouTube videos before finding useful information.

You don’t have to do that because this blog post will be a one-stop post for everything you need to plan your trip to Istanbul.

If you are in the UK or Nigeria the Visa/ entry requirements are not really complicated. This is because Turkey grants electronic visas (E-visa) to tourists and you can simply apply on their website “here”. You will need to provide a few documents including your round trip flight tickets, hotel reservation, passport data page and your residents permit. After providing these documents, you will receive an email containing your E-visa that looks just like this.

Some Other Important Things To Note Before visiting Istanbul

• The flight options are between Pegasus airline and Turkish airline. Pegasus is often the cheaper option. Make sure you use “google flights” to weigh your options.

• At the airport, you would be asked for your Turkish E-visa, round trip flight tickets, hotel reservations and your residents permit (if you live in the UK). Be sure to print all these documents or have the soft copies ready for inspection. You might be asked for a bank statement confirming that you can afford the trip for the duration of your stay so, keep a copy of your bank statement handy. This is not a strictly implemented rule but better safe than sorry.

• Choose a hotel in a central location because chances that you’ll come back late from your adventures are high. Also, I believe that where you stay lowkey sets the tone of your trip. You can check bookings.com or hotels.com. The rating of the hotel matters a lot because it tells you that people enjoyed their stay there.

• When you finally get to Istanbul, be friendly to the hotel staff because you should be a decent person (lol) but also because they can actually be really helpful with recommendations to places or spots to visit.

• Download Google Translate. Although some people in Istanbul understand english, a vast majority speak turkish. You would be saving yourself alot of stress by just downloading the google translator app.

• Keep your eyes glued to the taxi meter. Sometimes, the taxi driver might try to be shady and charge way more than the fare costs.

• Pack an European style adapter before you leave home or immediately you arrive to avoid having all your gadgets dying.

• The internet is your means of survival so, sort out your internet situation immediately you arrive Istanbul because Lyca, Three or any other UK sim will embarrass you. I intentionally got data before I left London and I did my research on if I could roam my sim card in Turkey and of course, my network provider assured me that I wouldn’t have a problem, but I had problems so, save yourself the stress and get a tourist sim card. It costs about 200 lira for the sim and a data bundle.

• Google the sites closest to you and plan your itinerary from there (if you didn’t already do that before arriving). But plan it and know the locations you can walk to and the locations you need to set out early to get to.

• Finally, be sure to check for the travel guidelines and fit to fly rules for your country and Turkey at least 48 hours before you travel because the rules keep changing.

I have an entire vlog of my wonderful trip to Istanbul and you should definitely check it out “here”

As always, I hope you enjoyed this blog post and I hope it was helpful to you.

xoxo, Cookie.