Travel Advisors Work Tirelessly to Bring Clients Home from the Middle East

As the war on Iran shows no signs of slowing down, news sources from around the world suggest that “thousands” of people from the United States are stuck in the region. NBC News reported that as of Wednesday, March 4, the U.S. State Department assisted nearly 6,500 Americans, “offering guidance and travel help.”

But the U.S. has also said stranded travelers should not count on the government for help. For some travelers – from the U.S. and around the world – help is a phone call a way to their travel advisor.

Since the start of the War on Feb. 28, 2026, travel advisors have been kept busy – sometimes 24/7 – doing everything they can to get their clients out of countries that just a week ago were perfectly safe to be in.

Rerouting

For some advisors, it was as simple as rerouting clients.

Holly Rafferty of Holly’s Vacations had a client that traveled to Thailand, via Dubai on Feb. 21 and was due to travel back to the U.S. via Dubai this week.

“Emirates did not cancel her flight until yesterday. We had to book her on a new flight home as nothing was going through Dubai, and had we waited she wouldn’t be getting home this week.”

Working with her client’s son, they were able to find a flight that left Bangkok, stopped in Manilla, and then traveled on to New York City, where she could make her way back to Philadelphia.

Laurence Pinckney, CEO of Zenbiz Travel, LLC, has a group currently in India that was supposed to return home via UAE.

“We had to rebook them through Air India when all the UAE airspace was closed… What a headache. Still working on getting them home. It is a complicated situation.  All this while escorting my own group in Brazil. It is all hands on deck,” he told TMR.

Leigh Ann Arnhold, CTIE, MCC & WSET III, of Carson Travel, had clients whose trips out to their final destination were interrupted mid-journey.

“I had clients in the air when the bombing started,” she told TMR. “An hour before they landed in Paris, their flight to Dubai was canceled.”

Luckily for them, the airline rerouted them back to the U.S. the next day. The only money they ended up having to shell out were for their overnight and meals.

The airline did not comp those expenses, citing Force Major.

“We also filed yesterday for a refund for the portion of the flights that were not used, since we booked refundable fares. Not holding my breath but wanted to ask for it for the clients.”

Dr. John M. Rose, chief risk advisor for ALTOUR, told TMR that advisors have successfully rerouted clients out the Middle East through Turkey, and even in some instance, Israel.

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Rebooking

Other advisors are still hard at work, trying to get their clients home.

“This is unprecedented,” Dr. Rose told TMR, explaining that in his 30 years of moving people out of dangerous situations, this is the largest number of people combined with the longest-period of time the dangerous situation has lasted, that he’s ever encountered. (Barring COVID-19, which was a different beast entirely.)

“Capacity is overwhelming the system,” he added, referring to the closure of airspace resulting in significantly less airlift and the movement of large numbers of people trying to cross borders into “safer” destinations.

“It has been nonstop on my end since Saturday,” Rosalena Huarcaya, an independent affiliate of CADENCE, said. “The situation is changing constantly. As we speak, I am reissuing tickets for the fourth time for one set of clients after multiple flights were canceled due to sudden airspace closures.”

The clients for whom she’s reissuing tickets were in Dubai as leisure travelers. Getting them home is turning out to be a “very complicated situation.”

What does getting them home look like?

She explained.

“In practice, that means constantly rebooking flights that are then canceled at the last minute due to airspace closures. Even when I manage to secure seats, I am ultimately at the mercy of whether the flight actually departs. It is extremely difficult to determine which flights are realistically operating, so I am looking for any route to Europe first and then connecting clients onward, avoiding transfers in the Middle East.”

For another set of clients – “who have the means” – Huarcaya said she’s purchasing backup tickets on other airlines to completely different destinations, just in case the first flight is canceled again.

At the time of her email to TMR on Wednesday evening, Huarcaya had managed to confirm clients on a flight from Abu Dhabi to Zurich for this coming Sunday (March 8).

“Abu Dhabi is about a 45-minute drive from Dubai and, although it is part of the UAE and subject to the same airspace restrictions, there are currently very few available flights departing Dubai… so Abu Dhabi has become the next easiest airport to try. Even then, I am still at the mercy of whether the airline actually operates the flight or if airspace restrictions change again.”

The United Arab Emirates is currently operating what it calls “safe air corridors,” allowing anywhere from 45 to 75 flights (numbers vary across news reports) per day to take off.

While that might sound like a lot, hundreds of people are vying for each and every seat on every flight, Dr. Rose pointed out.

Where possible, some agencies are chartering planes to get clients out.

“ALTOUR has run private charters, both on the security side and the ALTOUR Air side, which is a division of Internova,” he told TMR. “You’ve got to be able to get an airplane to do that and we can.”

Border Crossings

With flights extremely limited in select countries, some clients are trying to drive across border to more easily accessible airlift. Oman, in particular, has become appealing because there are more flight operating from Muscat than Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Dr. Rose said ALTOUR has moved significant numbers of clients into Oman.

However, as more people try to drive there, the lines at the border crossing are getting longer.

Dr. Rose said he’s hearing of waits as long as 12 hours, and that’s not including the up to six hour drive it can take just to get to the border.

“For some travelers, including a mother and daughter I am assisting right now, that journey can feel unsafe or too uncertain, even when my company can arrange security support,” Huarcaya said.

Advising

Monitoring flights and rebooking them as needed aren’t the only things advisors are doing.

“At the same time, I am contacting local embassies for my international clients to advise them of their names and locations. For U.S. passport holders it is also very important to enroll in the STEP program so the State Department has their information on file,” Huarcaya said.

Both Huarcaya and ALTOUR’s Dr. Rose told TMR that keeping clients informed and dispelling a lot of misinformation that’s circulating is a critical part of the travel advisor’s role right now.

“That’s a big part of what we do, it’s about advisor communicating with people,” Dr. Rose said.

“One of the biggest challenges right now is the amount of misinformation circulating online,” Huarcaya  said. “Some options that sound simple on social media, such as driving to another country to catch a flight, are far more complicated in reality, once you factor in border wait times, visa requirements, and the limited number of flights actually operating.”

“The last thing we want is someone taking it on themselves to say I’m going to Jordan or Oman and it’s a 12-hour border delay, and they can’t get across in a realistic time. If the delays that long, dd they bring food? How are they going to get fuel?” Dr. Rose asked.

“We want to help with communication so that people don’t make decisions that can put them in a more precarious situation,” he added.

Visa requirements, in particular, can make a lot of this planning complicated. Trying to go through Saudi Arabia, for instance, requires very specific visas that most people aren’t currently holding.

“That means I cannot simply book the next available flight. I first have to confirm whether they are legally able to enter or transit through that country and whether a visa can be obtained in time,” Huarcaya explained.

All in all, she said, “At times like this, it becomes a lot less about travel planning and more about real-time problem solving.”

When Clients Still Want to Go

John R. Schmitt, Jr., CTC, owner of Grand Traverse Travel in Michigan, found himself in a unique situation when his clients, a Michigan couple, wanted to stick to their scheduled itinerary to fly into Nairobi yesterday (March 5), then to Mali via a layover in Abu Dhabi on March 12, and home on March 21. 

Flying into Nairobi was no problem; that flight on Etihad Airways was still operating. The issue arose getting the clients from Nairobi to Mali, so the client took it into their own hands and booked the flight themselves on an airline Schmitt has not heard of called Indigo. 

“They were determined to go,” Schmitt told TMR. “She booked that online because she panicked that she wouldn’t be able to go at all. I didn’t want to book it myself because there was no recourse if things go wrong.” 

Schmitt said he feels confident he will get a refund for the original Etihad Airways flight that he had the couple on from Nairobi to Mali. The new plan does make him nervous, given that he does not have access to the new reservation the client made. He told TMR he will still help them however he can if problems occur. 

Leisure vs. Business Travelers

Most of the advisors that TMR spoke with are assisting leisure travelers, though ALTOUR’s client base that was in the Middle East at the start of the war was evenly split between leisure and business.

Dr. Rose pointed out that the business travelers were the first to react. Many companies have risk management platforms and policies and these kick in as soon as there are signs of trouble. Companies act immediately to get their employees out.

Leisure travelers. Dr. Rose explained are more likely to take a wait and see approach. They may assume everything will be over in a couple of days. They may want to check their insurance to see what’s covered. They may wait until their home country provides guidance.

In many of these cases, they wait too long and what little air capacity there is fills up.

With that said, Dr. Rose told TMR he believes ALTOUR will be able to get all its clients out of unsafe areas by March 15, at the latest.

TMR editor Briana Bonfiglio contributed to the reporting of this story.