With the crisis still unfolding in the Middle East, impacting travel in the region as well as the world, we asked Wego’s CEO and co-founder, Ross Veitch, for a situational analysis as well as what measures the region’s leading travel brand has taken and will be taking for the immediate future, and his outlook for the region.
Plus, what Wego did when its third-party SaaS product for customer service operations went down with the AWS Middle East outage, taking out its phone, live chat, and email support channels simultaneously at exactly the moment when customer contact volumes were spiking …
Here’s his report, exclusive to WiT.
Immediate impact
The impact was felt within hours of the situation escalating. Airspace closures triggered immediate schedule disruptions across our airline partners, and we saw a sharp surge in traffic, travellers searching for alternatives, checking refund eligibility, and monitoring routes in real time.
Cancellation and rebooking volumes spiked significantly.
What’s distinctive about this disruption is how geographically bifurcated it is. Roughly half of our routes have effectively shut down, while the other half are running at close to normal volumes. That’s very different from COVID, where demand collapsed across the board, this is a targeted disruption, with clearly affected corridors sitting alongside markets that are largely unaffected. For a platform with Wego’s regional breadth, that creates both a challenge and an opportunity: we’re managing acute disruption in one part of the network while continuing to serve healthy demand in the other.
Situational update
The picture is still evolving. A meaningful portion of MENA airspace remains restricted or subject to rapid change, and airline schedules are being updated daily. Forward bookings have contracted sharply, travellers are compressing their planning horizon and waiting for certainty before committing. Those who are booking are prioritising routing reliability over price.
One thing worth highlighting is how the region has responded to travellers caught in the middle. UAE hotels and hoteliers have been exceptionally accommodating of guests with unplanned extensions to their stays, and we’ve heard similar stories from across the Gulf. It’s Arabian hospitality at its finest and it matters, because how a destination treats stranded travellers in a crisis has a long memory.
Actions being taken now
We mobilised our customer operations immediately, scaling up support capacity to handle the volume of rebooking and cancellation requests. We’ve been in close contact with our airline and OTA partners to stay on top of schedule changes and ensure travellers are getting accurate, real-time information through the platform. We’ve also been proactive in surfacing flexible fare options and alternative routing so travellers have viable choices rather than just a dead end. Our customer service teams are working 24×7 to deal with the volumes.
Like many companies in the region, we had our own internal moment of uncertainty. Our teams in Dubai and Riyadh were understandably anxious in the early days, and we shifted to working from home as a precaution. But the air defence systems have performed extremely well, and life has returned to normal quickly, our teams are back in the office and fully operational. I’m proud of how everyone handled it.
What happened when AWS got hit
Wego’s platforms and apps were unaffected by the AWS Middle East outages so the disruption didn’t touch our search or booking systems. However, we do rely on a third-party SaaS product for customer service operations, and that went down with the AWS outage, taking out our phone, live chat, and email support channels simultaneously at exactly the moment when customer contact volumes were spiking.
The first 24 hours were tough. Response times were slower than we’d ever want during a crisis and I apologise to any Wego customers who had trouble getting through to us. But the team moved quickly to spin up alternative tools and restore customer service capacity. It was an uncomfortable reminder that your resilience is only as strong as your weakest dependency and it’s something we’re factoring into how we think about vendor architecture going forward.
Medium to long term outlook
We’re not concerned about the structural demand picture. Travel in and out of the Middle East is driven by factors that don’t disappear in a crisis large outbound markets, business connectivity, the massive VFR market, inbound tourism, and the Gulf’s role as a global transit hub. These are all durable and will see the region bounce back. We’ve seen it after every major disruption this region has been through.
What the medium term looks like depends heavily on how quickly airspace normalises and how the airline networks rebuild their schedules. If that clarity comes in weeks rather than months, we’d expect a sharp recovery in forward bookings, potentially accelerated by pent-up demand. If it extends, the recovery will be more gradual. Either way, we’re planning for both scenarios and making sure Wego is positioned to capture the rebound when it comes.
When the dust settles, I think the broader story of this crisis will be one of remarkable regional resilience. GCC governments have proven to be well prepared the civil and security response has held up under genuinely difficult circumstances. That matters for confidence. Investors, businesses, and travellers make long-term decisions about the Middle East based in part on how the region performs under stress, and the answer here has been reassuring. That’s a foundation the region can build on.
