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Over the weekend, missile debris rained over parts of Dubai\u2019s Palm Jumeirah, a tree-shaped, man-made island home to fine-dining establishments and luxury hotels, including the skyscraping Burj Al Arab hotel. According to local authorities, four individuals were injured in the resulting fire.<\/p>\n
The damages sustained by the hotels is only part of the story of how the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks have shaken the travel industry around the world. More than 23,000 flights have been cancelled globally since Iran\u2019s first retaliatory strike, according to data from flight analytics platform Cirium.<\/p>\n
Those cancellations\u2014including in key hubs such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha\u2014have stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers in the area. While some await government-organized repatriation flights to bring them home, others are willing to spend more than $200,000 for chartered flights to Europe from Dubai.<\/p>\n
MSC Cruise said on Thursday it would charter five flights, each carrying about 1,000 passengers, to repatriate its guests on the MSC Euribia, a 6,300-person capacity ship which remained docked in Dubai as a result of the conflict. The cruise line announced earlier in the week it would cancel its three remaining sailings from Dubai in March.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand that this will be disappointing, but we are sure that guests impacted will understand this decision,\u201d the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Taken together, these disruptions to global travel are among the largest the industry\u2014worth $11.7 trillion according to the World Travel & Tourism Council\u2014has seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have not seen anything like this ever outside of, frankly, the Covid pandemic, and that was very different. That was a health-related issue, and where travel was prohibited,\u201d Henry Harteveldt, founder of travel consultancy Atmosphere Research Group, told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cThis is obviously a war, a military conflict, and this has destabilized travel on the six populated continents of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n What Harteveldt said was \u201cunprecedented\u201d about the disruptions was their sheer magnitude. While the Middle East has seen its share of conflict in the past several decades, attacks have usually been concentrated in certain geographies. Iran\u2019s counterattacks have targeted not just Israel, but also the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, and Lebanon, among others. The attacks have instigated not just flight restrictions, but closures of swaths of airspace.<\/p>\n Countries in the area, such as UAE, rely on tourism as a major industry. In 2023, tourism accounted for about 12% of the country\u2019s economy. The Persian Gulf has become a home to millions of Indian migrant workers, many of whom travel back and forth across the corridor on sub-three-hour flights. The Dubai International Airport, the world\u2019s busiest hub for international travel, saw a record 95.2 million passengers in 2025.<\/p>\n Following attacks over the weekend, aircrafts and crew were grounded and displaced, leading to mass disruption.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have hundreds of aircraft that are not where they need to be,\u201d Harteveldt said. \u201cAnd with that, of course, you\u2019ve got pilots in the cabin crew who are not where they\u2019re supposed to be either.\u201d<\/p>\n Harteveldt expects the sector to recover. Hotel guests in the area report feeling safe and comfortable, and airlines have already begun to resume some, albeit limited, operations. Emirates announced on Thursday it would operate on a reduced flight schedule of more than 100 flights until further notice. The UAE has opened a \u201csafe air corridor\u201d to allow airlines like Emirates, as well as Etihad Airways and FlyDubai, with a capacity of 48 flights per hour. Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, UAE minister of economy and tourism, did not provide details on how the corridor functions.<\/p>\n The biggest challenge to the industry in the near future, Harteveldt said, would be prospective travelers reluctant to visit the Gulf and Middle East as a result of the conflict. The conflict will likely be contained, but Gulf region hubs seen as safe and reliable through previous skirmishes, will have to convince consumers they are still secure.<\/p>\n \u201cThe airlines, the airports, the countries, are going to have to take action to rebuild public trust in those institutions,\u201d Harteveldt said.<\/p>\n Others in the aviation industry see opportunity\u2014albeit other places across the globe\u2014amid the disruption. Ryanair CEO Michael O\u2019Leary predicted tourism in the Persian Gulf would falter for the next year or two, but he said in a press conference this week he\u2019s seen a surge in short-haul bookings in Europe for the Easter vacation period in particular. Ryanair operates smaller Boeing 737 aircraft almost exclusively across Europe.<\/p>\n The conflict, O\u2019Leary said, would be short-lived, and he did not forecast fundamental booking trends over the next few months.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump \u201chas a short attention span,\u201d O\u2019Leary said. \u201cSo he would want it to be over reasonably quickly or he\u2019ll get bored.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryanair and the White House did not immediately respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Iran #war #cancelled #flights #destabilized #travel #globally<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the weekend, missile debr… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2832,1410,15232,15233,1419,4646,6466,21,2836,1144],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Disrupting the $12 trillion travel industry<\/h2>\n
A resilient industry<\/h2>\n