In a Crisis, Travel Companies Count on Humans — Not AI 

Travel brands spent the years after Covid-19 shutdowns investing in AI-powered customer service and touting the efficiencies and cost savings. Now the Middle East airspace crisis is revealing the gap between marketing and customer reality. 

Travelers are facing hours-long queues, rebookings delayed for days, and a scramble for support as overwhelmed service teams struggle to keep up. 

And in this moment, when chatbots and agentic tools could actually help, AI is MIA from the spotlight. Crisis policies and customer directives hardly mention that tech. Instead, they send people to human agents during the biggest air travel disruption since the pandemic. 

When U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran commenced on February 28, the airspace closures across the region led to the cancellation of more than 43,000 of roughly 78,500 scheduled flights, according to Cirium data provided to Skift.

The firm’s latest calculations