The Lessons Travel Buried After Covid Are Resurfacing in the Middle East
Skift Take
The travel industry edited Covid into a convenient story about resilient demand while ignoring the system’s fragility. We’re seeing the cost of that rewrite in real time.
The Middle East airspace that connects two-thirds of the world's population went dark last week. More than 49,000 of 92,000 scheduled flights were canceled. Dubai International, the busiest international airport on earth, operated at a fraction of capacity. Governments chartered evacuation flights. Hundreds of thousands of people were stuck in Bali, Kuala Lumpur, Atlanta, and everywhere in between.
And on airline and OTA websites, a message that could have been copied and pasted from March 2020: *Due to heavy customer service volumes, please only contact us if you are traveling within the next 48 hours.*
That notice tells you everything the industry has learned — and hasn't learned — since the last time its systems broke.
Here’s the story the travel industry told itself after Covid: it was a demand shock — a terrible one — but demand came back. And r
