From London: As Australians woke this morning, a cascade of airspace closures across the Middle East was rewriting thousands of travel itineraries back home and abroad. The United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran late last week, triggering retaliatory fire from Tehran across Gulf states and sending one of the world's busiest air corridors into a near-total shutdown. For Australians, the consequences have been immediate, personal, and in some cases, deeply disorienting.
The Australian government's travel advisory service, Smartraveller, has now issued its highest-level "Do Not Travel" warning for ten countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Australians in Jordan, Oman and Saudi Arabia are advised to reconsider the need to travel. The breadth of those warnings is striking; this is not a targeted advisory for an active conflict zone but a broad sweep across a region that, for many Australians, is more familiar as a transit point than a destination.
Smartraveller's UAE page, updated as of 2 March, puts the situation plainly: "Due to the volatile security situation in the region and military strikes in the United Arab Emirates, we've raised our level of advice for the UAE to do not travel." Australian officials and their dependants are, the advisory notes, sheltering in place during strikes.
The disruption is centred on Dubai. Another 1,579 flights in and out of major airports in the Middle East were cancelled on Sunday alone, with Dubai International Airport the most affected: 747 flights, representing 70 per cent of its scheduled traffic, were axed. The three major Gulf carriers, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, typically carry around 90,000 passengers per day through those hubs. That daily throughput has been reduced dramatically. Gulf carriers Emirates and Etihad cancelled 38 per cent and 30 per cent of their flights respectively on Saturday, while Qatar Airways suspended all flights from Doha with 41 per cent of all flights cancelled.
For Australians, Dubai and Doha are not merely holiday destinations. They are the engine rooms of long-haul travel to Europe, the UK, and beyond. Airlines crossing the Middle East have had to reroute flights around the conflict, which will add hours to journeys and consume additional fuel, adding to costs airlines will need to absorb. Ticket prices could quickly start to increase if the conflict lingers. That is a warning worth heeding for any Australian planning to book travel to Europe in coming weeks.
Cancellations Hit Australian Airports
The domestic aviation impact is already measurable. As reported by 9News, at least five flights bound for Dubai or Qatar were cancelled from Sydney and seven from Melbourne. Adelaide saw three inbound and outbound cancellations, and Perth one in each direction. Airlines cautioned those numbers would shift throughout the day as more services were pushed back or scrapped entirely.
Travellers are stranded as far away as Australia, Brazil and the Maldives following the initial strikes. Among them, Australian traveller Penny Milton found herself stuck in Qatar, one of many ordinary holiday-makers caught in circumstances entirely beyond their control. Virgin Australia also confirmed the suspension of several flights operated by Qatar Airways, with affected passengers offered the option of rescheduling or requesting a refund.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been direct about the constraints it faces. Many Australians in the Middle East are unable to leave due to airspace closures around major transit hubs, and road and land border closures may also restrict movement, the department said. Australian citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family in Israel, Iran, the UAE and Qatar can register with DFAT to receive direct updates. The Australian government offered voluntary departures for all dependants of Australian officials posted to Qatar as far back as 25 February, in response to the deteriorating security situation. That the situation deteriorated further despite those precautions illustrates just how rapidly events moved.
The Broader Disruption: A Warning for All Travellers
What is perhaps most significant about the current Smartraveller guidance is its explicit warning to Australians who are not heading to the Middle East at all. The conflict has caused widespread airspace closures, flight cancellations and other travel disruptions both in the region and globally, and travel plans may be affected even if the destination is not in the Middle East. The main east-west air corridor over Iraq, typically described as one of aviation's busiest "superhighways" linking Asia with Europe, was almost completely empty as of Sunday morning, according to FlightRadar24's live tracking data.
International airlines including British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic suspended services to the Middle East in view of the conflict. Lufthansa Group said it would not fly to Tel Aviv, Beirut, Amman, Erbil and Tehran until at least 8 March. For Australians transiting through European hubs en route home, those suspensions may yet create secondary delays as aircraft and crew are repositioned.
There is also a hard financial reality for travellers. Standard travel insurance policies generally do not cover events that have already happened, whether military strikes or natural disasters; travellers would have needed to purchase a more expensive "cancel anytime" option to be protected. Some Australian insurers have confirmed that policies taken out after 11pm AEDT on 28 February will not cover claims caused by delays, cancellations and extended transit times due to airspace closures and military activity.
A Crisis With No Clean Edges
There is a temptation, from a distance, to view this as a problem for those who chose to travel to a volatile region. That framing misses the point. Dubai and Doha are transit hubs, not tourist destinations for most of the 280,000-odd Australians who fly through them each year. A family flying Sydney to London via Emirates, a businessperson connecting through Doha, a student returning from a semester abroad: these are the people stranded right now, and many had no particular view on the geopolitical decisions that upended their plans.
The Australian government's response, activating consular assistance, opening a DFAT registration portal, and urging affected travellers to contact their airlines, is reasonable and proportionate given the speed at which events have unfolded. Critics might argue that Canberra's posture on the broader US-Israeli operation, and its implications for Australians in the region, deserves more public scrutiny. The AUKUS partnership and the depth of Australia's security ties with Washington mean that Australia is not a neutral party in how these events are perceived across the Middle East.
What is clear, regardless of where one sits on the underlying geopolitics, is that the practical imperative for affected Australians is the same: register with DFAT, contact your airline directly, check your insurance policy carefully, and do not assume the situation will resolve itself quickly. Aviation analysts have cautioned that "for travellers, there's no way to sugarcoat this" and that passengers should prepare for delays or cancellations for the next few days as the conflict evolves. That is sober advice. For now, patience and vigilance are the only tools most Australians caught in this have at their disposal. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has urged all affected citizens to monitor the Smartraveller website for updates as the situation continues to change.