Middle East Travel Updates

Myles Woodman | NWUPC | Category Manager Posted on March 3rd 2026

Please see further information below in relation to Airports and Airlines that are currently imposing restrictions or cancellations to services in the Middle East with dates.

Dubai Airport was targeted over the weekend where a concourse “sustained minor damage”, the airport confirmed. Flight operations at the hub remain suspended until further notice while air space over Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE remains closed.

Regional carriers Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways have temporarily suspended all flights until Tuesday 3 March, while operations across several major European airlines have also been affected.

Lufthansa Group airlines – which includes SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and ITA Airways – will suspend flights to Tel Aviv, Beirut, Amman, Erbil, Dammam and Tehran until 8 March. Flights to from Dubai are suspended until 4 March and airspace over the United Arab Emirates will not be used during that time.

The group also advised that its carriers will avoid the airspace over Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Dammam and Iran until 8 March.

Air France has cancelled flights to and from Tel Aviv, Beirut, Dubai and Riyadh until 3 March. Meanwhile, sister airline KLM said it is currently not flying through the airspace of Iran, Iraq and Israel, “nor over several countries in the Gulf region”. Flights to and from Dubai, Riyadh and Dammam have been suspended until 5 March, while flights to Tel Aviv will be suspended for the remainder of its winter season operations.

IAG-owned British Airways said on Sunday (1 March) that it is “closely monitoring the situation” and has cancelled “a number of flights” to the Middle East. BA customers flying between London and Abu Dhabi, Amman, Bahrain, Doha, Dubai or Tel Aviv through to 15 March can change their flight date free of charge to travel on or before 29 March, the carrier said. Customers booked for travel up to and including 8 March can also request a full refund.

Airlines extend Middle East flight suspensions as industry counts cost

Myles Woodman | NWUPC | Category Manager Posted on March 13th 2026

With the end of the winter schedule fast approaching at the end of March, several airlines have opted to suspend services to key destinations such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha for the remainder of the season.

British Airways has cancelled all flights to Amman, Bahrain, Doha, Dubai and Tel Aviv up to and including 28 March. While the airline’s seasonal winter service from London Heathrow to Abu Dhabi will not operate again until October 2026. BA is also continuing to run repatriation flights from Muscat in Oman to London this week.

Another UK carrier, Virgin Atlantic, has now suspended its seasonal Heathrow-Dubai flights for this winter, which had been due to run until 28 March. The airline’s Riyadh services are also “paused” for the next two weeks, with their resumption being “assessed on an ongoing basis in line with the latest safety guidance”.

KLM has also cancelled all flights from Amsterdam Schiphol to Dubai up to and including 28 March. Sister carrier Air France has suspended flights from Paris to Dubai and Riyadh up to and including 14 March, while services to Tel Aviv and Beirut are cancelled up to and including 15 March.

Lufthansa Group’s flights to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Dammam, Amman and Erbil are currently suspended until 15 March, while Tel Aviv services are cancelled until 2 April. The group’s flights to Beirut are also suspended until 28 March, with services to Tehran cancelled until 30 April.

As airlines deal with the operational challenges of the ongoing war in the region, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) estimates that the conflict is costing the tourism sector $600 million per day in lost international visitor spending, as “disruptions to air travel, traveller confidence and regional connectivity affect demand”.

The WTTC points out that the Middle East accounts for 5 per cent of global international arrivals and 14 per cent of global international transit traffic.

Gloria Guevara, WTTC’s president and CEO, added that the travel sector was “resilient” and “can recover quickly” once the conflict ends.

“Our analysis of previous crises demonstrates that security-related incidents often see the fastest tourism recovery times, in some cases as quickly as two months, when governments and industry work together to restore traveller confidence,” she said.

Olivier Jankovec, director general of airports association ACI Europe, said that the war was “upending traffic forecasts” for 2026 and made the “outlook highly uncertain for now”.

“The Middle East and in particular the Gulf has over the past 20 years become an important part of connectivity and traffic volumes for many European airports – from larger regional ones to major hubs,” added Jankovec.

“This is not just about direct connectivity and traffic to the Middle East, but also indirect connectivity via that region to Asia-Pacific.”

Lufthansa Group has already reacted to this factor by adding more short notice long-haul flights to Asia and Africa during the next few weeks, with Lufthansa planning extra flights from Munich to Singapore, and Frankfurt to Cape Town. Austrian Airlines is also to operate 10 extra flights from Vienna to Bangkok.

The corporate travel industry is also waiting to see what impact the crisis and the huge shifts in oil prices are likely to have on airfares in the coming weeks and months.

Oil price turbulence: Gulf conflict may drive up air travel costs

Myles Woodman | NWUPC | Category Manager Posted on March 13th 2026

The price of oil approached $100 a barrel on Monday before lowering slightly to $91.11 at the market’s close on Tuesday, a reprieve based on vague (and already conflicted) assurances from the Trump administration that the military action in the Middle East, initiated by the United States and Israel at the very end of February, might be past its peak.

What we know right now is that oil reserves, production facilities and refineries – as well as the routes by which oil is exported from the Middle East to the rest of the globe – have been targeted in the violence.

Whether prices will level beneath the $100-mark or shoot well above that level is a guess right now. But the world is watching, and that includes airlines whose fortunes historically have been tied to crude prices. Will the travel industry see airfares spike? Is oil the only contributing factor?

The Argus US Jet Fuel Index, available on the Airlines for America’s website, shows that the average jet-fuel price for Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York has increased to $3.67 a gallon on 10 March from $2.50 a gallon on 27 February, the day before the US-Israel incursion into Iran.

But the industry has seen $100 a barrel oil prices before, most recently in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. It also exceeded that level in September 2013 thanks to tensions in Syria, in February 2012 over Iran’s nuclear programme and European Union sanctions and threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, during the Arab Spring of April 2011 coupled with Libya’s civil war, and in July 2008, when oil exceeded $145 a barrel due to increasing demand from developing countries, including China and India.

Looking at historical inflation data, US airfares did increase about 30 per cent year over year in 2022, but the Ukraine invasion and subsequent rise in oil prices coincided with the phenomenon known as “revenge travel” following the pandemic. Demand was exceptionally high, which likely would have increased prices even without oil spiking.

Airfares rose about 2.5 per cent year over year in 2013 and 0.3 per cent in 2012, so there’s not much correlation between oil prices and airfares for those periods. Average ticket prices did, however, increase about 9.3 per cent in 2011 compared with 2010, and were up about 12 per cent in 2008 compared with a year prior.

Still, jet fuel accounts for anywhere on average from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, sometimes more, of an airline’s total operating costs – second only to labour – and that percentage can go up when oil prices rise, and down when they decline.

And now some carriers have had to reconfigure flight routes to avoid Middle East air space, which adds time and fuel costs to each flight. The same issue has affected routes that used to fly over Russian air space for the past four years.

The portion of airline costs attributed to jet fuel is “significant since the airlines run on quite thin margins,” GoldSpring Consulting partner Neil Hammond told BTN. When asked if higher airfares were around the corner as a result, he replied that “the big question is going to be, how long does this [Iranian situation] last? It really depends on the duration and the outcome.”

One of the outcomes could be much more stability around the Strait of Hormuz, “which would have a good impact on oil prices longer term,” Hammond said.

Fuel surcharges

Before the stability, though, there is the risk of fuel surcharges.

On Tuesday, Air India announced a “phased expansion of a fuel surcharge” on tickets because of the steep rise in jet fuel prices. As a sample, for Africa routes, the new surcharge will be $90, up from $60. For Europe, it will be $125, up from $100. And for North America and Australia, it will be $200, up from $150, according to the carrier.

Airline fuel surcharges are not new. They first were implemented in 2004 to offset increased oil prices and were supposed to be temporary, “but it never went away, did it?” Hammond said.

“Some airlines renamed it a carrier surcharge, and despite how low oil prices have been or how stable they’ve been for good parts of the last two decades, they never took that surcharge away.”

Flat-fee surcharges insulate airlines from corporate percentage discounts, Hammond said. If the fee were a percentage, the value of it would decrease as airfares decrease, but if it’s a flat fee, the corporate discount doesn’t apply to it, he said.

Where an airline is based also is a factor on surcharges as currency exchanges come into play. Most carriers purchase their aircraft in US dollars or euros. The price of fuel is based on the US dollar. But carriers outside of the US and Europe have most of their revenue in currencies other than the dollar or euro.

Hammond gave Turkish Airlines as an example. “They’re going to have some revenue based in dollars because they fly to the US, but most of their revenue is going to be in Turkish lira,” he said. “The Turkish lira has been weakening … for many years, so their revenue base goes down, but their cost base goes up. So that’s impacted them. Japan’s another one. Brazil is another one. Some of those airlines have suffered due to currency fluctuations, and this will just compound that.”

Case in point, Air New Zealand has suspended its fiscal year 2026 guidance, issued just weeks ago, and announced increases to its ticket prices, citing fluctuating jet-fuel prices, according to multiple reports. Qantas is raising fares on international routes due to fuel spikes, and Scandinavian carrier SAS also has implemented a “temporary” fuel-related price increase.

Carrier response

While there haven’t been any reports yet of US carriers raising prices or increasing fuel surcharges, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby on 6 March said that the recent increase in fuel prices “will have a ‘meaningful’ impact on the carrier’s financial results this quarter,” according to CNBC, but that “demand has been resilient.”

Lufthansa Group CEO and chairman Carsten Spohr during an earnings presentation last week said prolonged airspace closures over the Middle East and Russia will lead to longer travel distances, “which means higher prices, but the market determines the price and this goes for fuel prices as well”.

Lufthansa financial chief Till Streichert added that the group’s “solid” fuel hedging strategy will “give us a competitive advantage in an environment of rising oil prices”. The airline group’s hedging ratio for 2026 and into 2027 is 81 per cent.

“What’s decisive at the end of the day is how we compare to our competitors,” Streichert said. “Even if we’re in for a higher fuel bill, I believe we are in a good position.”

European rival IAG, which owns British Airways, also has a fuel hedging policy, which operates on a three-year rolling basis. According to its latest earnings report, published on 27 February, the group has hedged 62 per cent of its expected fuel costs for 2026.

Some US carriers used to engage in fuel hedges, but Southwest Airlines was the last major US carrier to do so, and it announced in 2025 that it had discontinued that practice. On a 24 July, 2025, earnings call, Southwest CFO Tom Doxey said that “we recently terminated our remaining hedge portfolio for cash proceeds of $40 million, which reduced our future premium expense through 2027.”

As of June 30, 2025, “the company had no fuel hedging contracts outstanding,” according to the carrier.

Delta Air Lines, though, owns a refinery, located in Pennsylvania, which works like a hedge for the carrier. The facility can refine about 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, “or approximately 75 per cent of our consumption, for use in our airline operations through the production of jet fuel and through exchanges and sales of gasoline and diesel fuel produced by the refinery,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from 11 February, 2026.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the Middle East situation and oil price increases will lead to higher airfares. The increased costs likely will negatively affect airlines’ bottom lines for the first quarter, and possibly the second quarter if the war in Iran persists.

But there isn’t anything a travel manager can do at the moment. “It’s really out of their hands,” Hammond said. “For the most part, they don’t control the travel budget. That’s local managers and cost-centre owners. So, if there’s a spike in prices and people take trips during this time, then what’s going to probably happen is that instead of some department having 10 travel trips planned before the end of the year, they’re only going to do nine. They’ll have to spread [the budget] out over fewer trips.”

And if there is an increase in airfares?

“I think anything we see is going to be very, very short term,” Hammond said. “Ultimately, [the airlines] can raise prices, but it has to be on the supply and demand model. If they start just raising prices on a cost-plus basis and the demand isn’t there, then they’re just going to end up with a bunch of unsold seats.”