SunExpress

SunExpress is the Turkish-German leisure carrier jointly owned by Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, built almost entirely around sun routes between Europe and the Turkish coast. Think Antalya, Izmir and Dalaman on one end, a long list of German and wider European cities on the other. It flies a single-class Boeing 737 fleet, so the choice on a SunExpress booking is not which cabin but which seat within one long economy cabin.

The fleet is all Boeing 737, split between the older-generation 737-800 and the newer 737 MAX 8. Both are laid out 3-3 in a single economy cabin, so from a seat-choice point of view they behave much the same. The MAX 8 runs quieter and a little more efficient, but a traveller feels the seat-map differences far more than the airframe: which side the sun falls on, how close a row sits to a wing or a lavatory, and whether the row ahead reclines into your knees.

This is holiday flying, priced accordingly. Legroom is standard short-to-medium-haul economy across the cabin, with the usual trade-offs baked into the layout rather than the fare: the front rows board and leave first, the rear rows sit near the galley traffic, and the seats over the wing lose some of the view on a daytime Mediterranean run. SunExpress sells extra-legroom rows and front seats as paid extras, which is where the real comfort difference sits if the flight is more than a couple of hours.

For a leisure route the window is usually worth choosing, particularly on the side away from the midday sun if you burn easily on a long daytime leg. If you want off the aircraft quickly for a tight transfer or a coach waiting at Antalya, pick a row well forward of the wing. Families travelling with a lap infant should look at the bulkhead rows, and anyone tall should treat the paid extra-legroom rows as the sensible spend rather than gambling on a standard seat with a full recline in front.