Gulf war disrupts travel as tourists scramble way home

Could this be one travel trauma too many?

- SIMON CALDER TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT

This weekend, hundreds of the “time-rich, cash-rich” cohort who bankroll much of the UK travel industry are converging on Sri Lanka for a midnight plane to Stansted tonight.

One couple, Jeff and Wendy Spencer from Surrey, will have overstayed their planned trip by 12 days by the time they step onto the chartered Spanish aircraft for the 10-hour flight to Essex.

They will get back sooner than John and Sian Parker from North Wales, who are locked in limbo in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. “We’ve just been left to our own devices,” says Ms Parker.

Their airline, Etihad, hopes to fly them back on Tuesday after more than a week of on-and-off communications. But the couple acknowledge they are in a relatively good situation. “We keep telling ourselves: thank God we’re not in Abu Dhabi or Dubai,” Ms Parker says.

The first casualty of war is tourism. Within hours of the first US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February, Tehran was dispatching missiles - and drones laden with 90kg of explosives - to try to hit key economic infrastructure in the UAE and elsewhere.

Dubai, seen for decades as a safe and serene haven offering guaranteed sunshine and indulgence, now find itself on the Foreign Office no-go list, along with Abu Dhabi, just down the road in the UAE, and Doha in Qatar.

In a normal fortnight, seven million passengers would fly to, through or from the key Middle East hubs. Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways have long offered an aviation superhighway to British holidaymakers: connecting cities across the UK with destinations in Asia, Australasia and Africa.

That role has come to a sudden halt, with attention now on getting stranded travellers where they need to be. Emirates and Etihad are selling commercial tickets, which is one reason the UK government and British Airways are no longer putting on evacuation flights from Muscat in Oman.