Updated: March 16, 2026
Skift Take
The travel industry thought its infrastructure and crisis response were ready for the next big disruption. The war on Iran and its ripple effects have shown us that this optimism was misplaced.
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Welcome to a special weekend edition of Skift’s regular newsletter, The Daily. You can subscribe here.
And you can read all of Skift’s Iran War coverage here.
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 wor
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