Santhosh Kanakandath still managed to fly to Berlin from Oman to represent his travel agency at the ITB Berlin tourism trade fair, despite the travel disruption caused by the war in the Middle East.
But he fears the potential effects on his business if the conflict continues for much longer, he told AFP at the global travel industry event, which opened on Monday.
Iran’s strikes on Gulf states following US-Israeli attacks have grounded most regular flights and shut shipping lanes, causing the biggest disruption to global travel since the Covid pandemic.
Some 19,000 flights have been cancelled in four days and tens of thousands of travellers remain stranded in the Gulf region, waiting for special flights chartered by governments and tour operators to take them home.
Kanakandath said his As’saraya travel agency, which specialises in jeep expeditions in the Omani desert, has already lost 1,500 bookings for the spring — a fifth of its annual business.
April in particular is a busy month for tourism in the Gulf region because the weather is not as hot as in the summer, when temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).
In the deserted section of the ITB reserved for the Gulf countries, Kanakandath has sought to offer reassurance to potential European business partners at the trade fair.
“Partners ask especially if it is safe, and what do we do in case something happens, to escape quicky,” he told AFP.
– Global hub paralysed –
Since the Gulf region is a global air traffic hub, the crisis has also affected travel well beyond the Middle East.
Asia and Australia in particular depend on its hubs for passengers travelling to Europe and the US, said Slovenian travel agent Andrej Lenic.
“If you travel (between these regions), you need to go through the Middle East,” he said.
For the foreseeable future, he plans to direct his customers towards other destinations further west, such as the Mediterranean, Western Europe and the Caribbean.
Martin Lutterjohann, 82, from Munich, was at the trade fair to try and get answers on whether his planned trip to Uzbekistan via Sharjah in May could still go ahead.
But the only answer he got was that “nothing is working at the moment”, he said.
Many of the professionals at the fair said they had survived the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Covid pandemic and multiple other conflicts affecting the Middle East.
But this time is different, they said, with the crisis paralysing travel to and from an entire region.
– Refunds and compensation –
Bookings for the next few days have been cancelled across the board, while those for the coming weeks have been postponed or put on hold.
“In Jordan or Lebanon, we experience this kind of crisis practically every year. But across the region, this is the first time,” said Dani Nader, director of the Lebanese agency TLB.
The agency had 60 customers in the Middle East when the strikes began, all of whom have since been able to return home.
The next step is to negotiate refunds and compensation.
Nader is confident that in the longer term, tourists will still want to visit the region.
But for now, he and the other agents at the fair remain glued to their phones, keeping up with the latest developments and hoping for news of when the airspace will reopen.