The impact of 3 conflicts in 3 years on tourism in the Middle East

In the three years spanning October 2023 through September 2026, the Middle East region has experienced three separate shocks to its travel and tourism industry, including the ongoing Gaza war, the 12-day Israel-led and US-backed Iran war of June 2025, and the US-led and Israel-backed war with Iran that began on February 28 of this year. Following the outbreak of each new conflict, international media coverage treated the region as a single destination at war, and many travelers, especially from long-haul markets such as the United States, adopted that narrative without question - at least initially.

But data released by the region's tourism ministries, central banks, and airport authorities do not support that narrative. According to UN Tourism, international arrivals to the Middle East grew in 2023, 2024, and 2025, with the region finishing last year 39% above 2019, the strongest result of any world region against pre-pandemic levels.

The 2026 decline is real for the region overall, at 14% in the first quarter and 22% in the first half; however, that decline is concentrated in the countries that were directly involved in the conflicts. For anyone from those long-haul markets who may still be confused, there are many countries in the Middle East region, not just one.

In fact, the distance across the region we commonly refer to as the Middle East is roughly 7,131 kilometers or 4,431 miles from Pakistan to Morocco, nearly double the distance across the North American continent from Washington, DC to San Francisco.

For rhetorical comparison, imagine a conflict breaking out in Mexico City and travelers from Cairo or Dubai believing, based on lazy media reporting about "troubles in North America,” that it was now unsafe to travel to Seattle or Montreal or Hawaii as a direct result. That’s precisely how bizarre it sounds to those who are from the Middle East region or who know the region well when tourists or potential tourists invoke conflicts in other countries thousands of miles away as a reason to cancel or delay travel.

Egypt, for example, has actually grown its tourism arrivals through all three regional conflict episodes over the past three years, and Dubai did as well through the first two before it was finally negatively affected by being directly involved in the third.

Jordan has been hit particularly hard throughout the entire period despite not being directly involved in any of the conflicts. However, given its geographic position being situated between Iran and Israel, Jordan’s airspace has been necessarily shut down every time a conflict or even a flare-up has broken out between its more powerful regional neighbors.

So while Jordan’s main tourist areas of Amman, Petra, Jerash, Wadi Rum, and Aqaba remained perfectly safe, visitors could not be sure that, even if they could fly into the country, they would be able to get back out on schedule.

Petra, the ancient Nabataean city that is widely considered now to be one of the new wonders of the world and which anchors Jordan’s tourism industry, welcomed 1 million visitors in 2022. In the months after October 2023, those visitor numbers fell almost 70%, according to Yazan Mahadin, commissioner of the Petra Archaeological Park. The site recorded just 457,215 visitors in all of 2024, compared to 1.174 million the year before.

Egypt and Dubai, two of the region's most popular destinations, still kept growing. Egypt reported 14.9 million foreign visitors in 2023 and 15.7 million in 2024, both record figures. Arrivals rose 27% in the first four months of 2024, with Arab visitors up 54%. Dubai grew 9% to 18.72 million visitors for the year.

However, UN Tourism's 2024 total for the wider region as a whole reflected a growth of only 1% above 2023, drastically lower than the numbers reflected in data from many individual countries.

Despite the ongoing growth in certain destinations within the region, travel agencies from North America and other long-haul markets experienced widespread recoil in 2024. Kensington Tours reported a sharp rise in cancellations and a decline in new Egypt bookings that lasted months to a year after October 2023, and Goway stopped promoting its Middle East and Egypt programs altogether.

While these companies’ experiences reflect their own clients within their own target markets, Egyptian ministry data confirm that tourism numbers still rose healthily, largely fueled by travelers from markets closer to home who were undeterred by Western media’s over-generalizations.

When the 12-day Israel-led war of June 2025 drew in US strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites on June 22 followed by an Iranian counter-attack on a US air base in Qatar the next day, the effect on arrivals in Gulf destinations only lasted for about a month. Dubai closed the first half of 2025 up 6% with 9.88 million international visitors and a hotel occupancy rate of just over 80%. Although the emirate’s overall tourism growth settled at 5% by the end of that year, it finished with a record 19.59 million visitors.

In Egypt, hotels saw an average room cancellation rate above 10% in June, according to Sherif Fathy, Egypt's Minister of Tourism and Antiquities. But the country still closed the first half with 8.7 million arrivals, 24% more than a year earlier, and finished the year at a record of almost 19 million visitors.

Jordan entered that period of conflict with its flagship tourist site of Petra still far below its pre-October 2023 levels, with just 16,207 foreign visitors in June 2025 against 68,349 in June 2023 and 53,888 in June 2019. Hotels in Wadi Musa, the town adjacent to Petra Archaeological Park’s entrance, reported more than 90% of bookings canceled, while hotels in Amman and Aqaba ran at about 35% occupancy that month. And even many of those reservations turned out to be transit stays booked by people leaving other countries rather than by tourists visiting Jordan.

Across the region, however, arrivals still grew 3% for the year, obviously heavily buttressed by the record growth experienced by the likes of Egypt and Dubai.

Following the outbreak of the latest war with Iran in late February of this year, Dubai found itself in the new position of being directly targeted by Iran. Iranian strikes were reported at Dubai's Jebel Ali port starting on March 1, which led airspace across the Gulf to close for weeks.

The Gulf is notably home to not only three of the biggest airlines in the region, but three of the largest and most elite in the world, including Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, all of which share very tight airspace corridors between their shores and Iran just across the waterway.

In the first two days of the 2026 war, Oxford Economics counted more than 5,000 flight cancellations. A ceasefire did not go into effect until 39 days later on April 8, and the UAE did not fully lift its air travel restrictions until early May.

For Dubai, which depends heavily on arrivals by air, the closed skies above and around it were particularly devastating for its travel industry. Passenger traffic at Dubai International fell 66% in March, and CoStar recorded hotel occupancy down to 20-30%, with some properties as low as 5%.

DXB handled 31.5 million passengers in the first half of 2026, down over 31% from 46 million a year earlier. Dubai Airports now expects a total of about 70 million passengers for the full year, compared with a pre-war projection of nearly 100 million.

The emirate’s recovery, however, has been fast. Monthly passenger traffic rose from 5 million in June to 6.3 million in July, which Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai Airports, called a “trampoline bounce.” Hotel occupancy reached 66% in August, equal to about 89% of occupancy levels a year earlier.

Other Gulf states were less impacted, but only because of their popular highway connections to neighboring Saudi Arabia. Tourism Economics notes that 32% of Qatar’s visitors arrive over land, while the figure is as high as 74% for Bahrain. Visitors to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, rely much more heavily on arrivals by air.

In Jordan, this year's losses fell mainly on Petra and came mainly from cancellations by Western tour groups. Adnan al-Sawair, chairman of the board of commissioners of the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority, said the year had opened with 112,000 foreign visitors in January and February before March bookings were nearly 100% canceled, followed by 60% of April bookings and 45% of May bookings.

Mahmoud Khasawneh, president of the Jordan Tourism and Travel Agents Association, said American and British cancellations were close to 100% and Asian markets nearly 80%, while Europeans were less hesitant to follow through with travel plans to the kingdom. The Central Bank of Jordan reported that first-quarter tourism revenue was down 4% to about $1.6 billion, almost all of it from a 23% overall decline in March.

Lebanon, where fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in the south of the country resumed in the same week that the 2026 Iran war began, saw airport passenger traffic fall by 74.6% in April.

Throughout the entire year, as regional neighbors were forced to close or severely restrict their airspace, Egypt kept its airspace open. Regional carriers rerouted many flights to or through Egyptian airports, which Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy said contributed to a 16% rise in first-quarter arrivals to Egypt, the strongest record in the region according to UN Tourism.

But April 2026 was different for Egypt, despite nothing changing in its security situation. On March 2, an assistant secretary of state mistakenly posted a graphic on X (formerly Twitter) listing Egypt alongside the Gulf states as places that US citizens should “depart now."  Within hours, the market reacted and cancellations came flooding in for trips to Egypt.

Viking reversed its Nile cruise cancellations once the advisory was updated, but Tauck canceled its March Egypt departures and April arrivals overall fell about 16%. For the record, Egypt is more than 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from Iran, was never involved in any of the recent conflicts involving Iran or Israel, and was never targeted in any of Iran’s retaliatory attacks.

Egypt's overall numbers recovered largely because most of its visitors come from Europe and the Arab world. Arrivals were up 7% through April and 4% through June, with the US market up 2%, and the ministry now expects as many as 20 million visits by year end, although this is still below the 21 million it expected before the war but above the 2025 record of 19 million.

BMI's regional breakdown projections for Egypt in 2026 put expected arrivals from Europe at about 10.2 million while 3.9 million are expected from the Middle East and 677,000 from the United States, or just over 3% of the total. Gulf visitors have driven this summer's growth on Egypt's emerging North Coast, a stretch of Mediterranean coast with wide white-sand beaches and clear turquoise water that remains largely undiscovered by visitors from the West. New Alamein, one of the new resort cities along the North Coast and home to a military airport that was recently opened to civil aviation, has reported a 450% rise in charter traffic.

Across the three episodes of regional conflict over the past three years, the trend is that the real economic damage has followed the geographic distribution of the fighting rather than countries whose geographies happen to carry the regional label. How long those states’ airspace remained closed or restricted has largely governed how quickly each destination recovered, from about a month after the 12-day war to the five months Dubai needed this year to return to 89% of its prior-year occupancy.

Following both the outbreak of the Gaza war and this year's Iran war, North American travelers were the quickest to scrap travel plans, while regional travel by Arabs remained high, tracking along with their greater on-the-ground knowledge and understanding of why a conflict in Mexico City shouldn’t make one afraid to visit Phoenix… or Hawaii.

As we head into the final quarter of 2026, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha are rebuilding their schedules while Egypt expects a fourth consecutive record. Jordan's total remains down but by single digits, although Petra is still waiting for Western tour groups to return after three disrupted seasons in a row.

If we have learned anything from this three-year case study in regional conflict, it should be that when the next conflict arises, as it surely will, travelers should expect its realistic impact on risk to depend on the countries which are actually involved, not on the regional label shared by everyone else across a distance that spans nearly twice the width of both North America and Europe.