Hello, readers. Welcome to a special weekend edition of The Daily. This week marked six years since Covid shut down global travel. That anniversary arrived with an unwelcome echo: another crisis in the Middle East, another corridor in chaos, and another chance to see whether the industry absorbed any of the lessons it swore it had learned. Skift spent the week reporting this story from every possible angle — airfares, airline policies, the OTA rebooking mess, AI's disappearing act, and the broader question of whether post-pandemic investments actually prepared anyone for what's happening now. No one else covered it like this. Here's what we found.
On February 28, U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran triggered airspace closures across the Middle East. An estimated 5 million passengers were affected. The UAE — home to one of the world's busiest travel corridors — became, almost overnight, one of the hardest places on earth to leave.
And leaving got very expensive. A Skift analysis of airfares out of the Gulf found staggering markups. An Etihad flight from Abu Dhabi to Kochi that averaged $131 last March was listed at $2,555. The same carrier's Abu Dhabi-to-London route jumped from $298 to $4,918. Dubai to Istanbul on Flydubai went from $210 to $1,737. These are not first-class cabins. These are economy seats on routes that, a year ago, cost less than a decent hotel room.
Some of the inflation is defensible. Jet fuel is up 60%. Rerouted flights burn more of it. War-risk insurance premiums have spiked. Linus Benjamin Bauer, who runs a UAE-based aviation consultancy, explained to Skift that airlines typically fly at 82-84% capacity — so even a modest reduction in available flights can push the remaining seats to full occupancy, which automatically triggers peak pricing. The math is cold, but it's real.
What's harder to defend are the stories passengers told us. One Dubai-based traveler said Air India emailed him on March 6 to say his flight to Mumbai was canceled. When he checked the airline's website, the same flight was listed at nearly double the original fare.
Skift confirmed through Flightradar24 that the flight operated. Another traveler, trying to return to Dubai from India, had two consecutive flights canceled. He ultimately flew to Muscat for $520 and completed the journey on a 10-hour overnight bus.
For the wealthier, there were private jets — Ahmed Elhawary of Dubai-based Mayfair Jets told Skift that charter requests surged 200-300%, and a 14-seat jet from Dubai to Cairo that previously cost $40,000 was now going for $150,000 to $170,000. The price shock, though, was only part of the dysfunction.
We went deeper, and found that underneath the fares was a tangle of conflicting airline policies that left passengers unsure of their most basic rights.
Emirates and Qatar Airways issued blanket fee waivers for all of March. Etihad and Air India chose a different approach: rolling waivers with narrow date windows that expanded every few days, leaving some travelers temporarily outside any coverage. ATPCO, the industry body that manages fare rules, still has the emergency flexibility protocol it built during the pandemic — a system designed to let carriers override restrictions during exactly this kind of event.
But the tools are only as good as the policies airlines choose to wrap around them. A management consultant named Ash, trying to get from Mumbai back to Boston on Etihad, was rebooked, canceled, rebooked again, and ultimately spent a week stranded after waiting more than four hours in a customer service queue.
His experience got worse before it got better. Because Ash had booked through an OTA, Expedia, he found himself caught in the gap between the airline and the platform. Etihad told him to contact his travel agent. Expedia initially told him his ticket was non-refundable. A supervisor eventually rebooked him — but the reservation vanished from the app the next morning.
OTAs say they've improved since the pandemic, and the evidence suggests that's partly true. Expedia is processing refunds directly, Airbnb activated its Major Disruptive Events Policy, and the UAE government itself stepped in to cover hotel stays for stranded travelers — a move without precedent during Covid.
But a more flexible policy doesn't help when the company can't be reached. Which raises the question the industry has been dodging: where was the Great White Knight of AI?
Travel companies have spent the post-pandemic years pouring money into chatbots and virtual agents. Etihad built a bot it claimed could serve 52% of its customers and scale to millions. Emirates partnered with OpenAI. United Airlines promoted a system it said was designed for high-stakes disruptions.
And then the disruption came, and nearly all of them went quiet.
Etihad's chat queue hit 1,600 people. Emirates asked customers to wait up to 72 hours for a direct message reply. Most carriers dropped AI from their crisis communications entirely, directing passengers to human agents and manual refund forms. One traveler told Skift that Etihad's chatbot disconnected him the moment it detected he'd booked through a third party.
In the vacuum, travelers improvised. A travel blogger launched WhatsApp groups that grew to more than 2,200 members within three days. They coordinated exit routes, shared real-time flight information, and arranged rides for one another — doing, collectively and for free, what billions of dollars in airline technology was supposed to do.
Six years ago, the pandemic revealed how fragile travel's infrastructure really was. The industry promised it would be different next time. This week, Skift put that promise to the test from every angle — fares, policies, platforms, technology — and found it's very much still wanting. – Sarah Kopit, Editor-in-Chief | 
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