Last year, a third of all flights between Europe and Asia passed through airports in the Gulf. For travellers from Europe to Australasia, the share was more than half.
After last week’s attacks, however, a question hangs over the region: how long will it take to restore people’s confidence about visiting and travelling through?
“We have been a kind of geographical nexus of trouble, and yet the city can continue to deflect and ignore and build and continue to build,” Emirates president Tim Clark told the FT the day before the attacks on Iran began. “It has a high degree of resilience.”
Speaking as US ships gathered in the Gulf, he said: “There are some geopolitical issues, those are going on at the moment, and having to have the airline prepared and the constant state of readiness for anything that could happen, we’re good at doing it, we’ve been at it for 40 years since we started the airline.”
Daria Guristrimba, who runs the Globe7 travel agency, said that the return of travel and tourism “depends how long this crisis will go on”.
“If they resume flights in several days, and if they show that they handle this situation . . . I think that it will be back very soon, in a few months. But if the situation is ongoing, people will see that nothing really secure is there, and it will influence it a lot.”
History shows passengers are willing to return to flying, even after major shocks such as the September 11 attacks.
“People always come back,” said Julia Lo Bue-Said, who runs the Advantage Travel Partnership, a trade association. “You can’t overlook the fact that the Gulf is a major global connector. It’s hard to even contemplate it not operating as a transit destination.”
Even so, some in the industry are worried. “The concern is that people will start to say: I won’t fly through the Gulf as it’s too uncertain,” said one industry executive. “If this turns out to be a short event . . . that is probably manageable for airlines. If it’s two to three months, it’s a completely different problem.”
All regular flights at the three hubs of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha remain suspended, though Emirates and Etihad have started repatriation flights from their respective bases of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Doha, where Qatar Airways is based, is still completely closed.
For these three airports to all close is both highly unusual and disruptive. Dubai airport is the busiest in the world, processing 95mn passengers last year.
Five days of cancellations across the region have left an estimated 4mn passengers stranded, some in the Gulf, others in Asia or Europe waiting for connecting flights, according to data provider Cirium.
Any disruption to the system that funnels passengers through the Gulf mega hubs threatens the business model of the region’s largest airlines. At Etihad and Qatar Airways, roughly 80 per cent of passengers are in transit rather than visiting the region. At Emirates, the figure is about half.
To respond to the challenge, Gulf carriers have one significant advantage: financial firepower.
“These countries will discount dramatically, and there are a very large number of people who will choose based on price,” said one industry expert who has worked for several major airlines.
“If you’re looking for an upside, people can expect cheap air tickets.”
Even if hostilities cease and travellers return in the coming months, rivals will have a window to win market share.
As the Middle East has grown as a transport hub over the past decades, airlines elsewhere scaled back direct flights to Asia. Several large European airlines are now preparing to add flights to Asia within weeks, according to executives and people briefed on the airlines’ strategy, using planes that would otherwise have been sent to the Middle East.
The aim is to attract passengers who would otherwise have transferred through the Gulf. Managing crew locations, permits and landing slots is a logistical challenge, but the airlines believe they have a chance to win back some of the business they previously ceded.
One consideration is aircraft availability. Years of delayed deliveries from Boeing and Airbus mean most carriers have little spare capacity. Sending fewer planes to the Gulf frees up space elsewhere.
The other potential beneficiary of the disruption is Istanbul airport. The mega-hub, and base of Turkish Airlines, has not been affected by the conflict. It has major expansion plans, with a fifth runway already opened and plans for nine in total.
Turkish Airlines on Thursday said it had seen increased demand from passengers who are “stranded and want to get back to their final destination”, said chief financial officer Murat Şeker.
Whether the trend holds in the longer term “will take a little bit more time to evaluate”, he added.
In the short term, the disruption remains. Travel agents report a collapse in bookings for the region since the weekend, as well as a wave of cancellations for months ahead. “Some people are uneasy about the rest of the year, others are asking whether October will be OK,” said one UK-based travel agent. Easter is an unknown. “Three to four weeks away is a long time, things could get back to normal,” they added.
Yet not all holidaymakers have been put off. On Monday, one travel agent received a booking for a honeymoon in Dubai next year. The agent was expecting questions about safety. Instead, “they didn’t even mention it”.
Additional reporting by Stephanie Stacey and Sylvia Pfeifer in London