It was supposed to be a quiet Saturday. Daria Guristrimba had her tea, her dog, and a film she’d been meaning to watch. Then her husband walked in and told her to check the news.
She never did finish that movie.
By the time drone debris had struck the Burj Al Arab, flames had risen from the Fairmont Palm, and a concourse at Dubai International Airport lay damaged, the founder and CEO of luxury travel advisory Globe7 — an invite-only London-based firm serving ultra-high-net-worth travelers who spend at least $500,000 per year on bespoke journeys — was already deep in the work she knows too well: pulling clients out of a destination that had, seemingly overnight, become somewhere you needed to escape from rather than escape to.
For Guristrimba, it was a brutal kind of déjà vu: Covid. Ukraine. Now this.
Globe7 draws heavily on an ultra-high-net-worth client base across the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. In other words, precisely the people most exposed when the Gulf stopped feeling like a safe harbor.
The cancellation numbers are staggering.
“We have 100% cancellations for the Middle East for the entire year,” Guristrimba told Luxury Travel Advisor. “Every booking, even those planned for June and July, has been canceled — including for American clients.”
She noted that U.S. travelers were initially the most reactive — a pattern that tracks with broader industry data and sentiment shared this week at the International Hospitality Investor Summit in Berlin, showing American travelers are often quickest to pull the plug when geopolitical instability emerges anywhere near their itinerary, even if their specific destination is unaffected.
The crisis has moved far beyond trip cancellations. For the significant population of UHNW expats living in the Middle East, it has become an evacuation.
“Today, we arranged 18 flights for Dubai-based families escaping to Asia,” Guristrimba said earlier this month. “Most clients are heading back to Europe, to second homes or family. Those who don’t want cold weather are moving toward Thailand.”
And then there are the pets.
“Many clients living in the Middle East have pets, and commercial airlines aren’t an option for them,” Guristrimba said. “I’ve seen agents’ messages asking who can get a cat out by land, who can take a dog. People are leaving, and they want their pets to survive too. It’s a real problem.”
For those with means, private aviation has become the fallback — but at extraordinary cost, and not without its own chaos.
“People were paying anywhere from $130,000 to $200,000 for these flights because only Turkish operators were flying there,” Guristrimba said.
Long-Term Structural Damage to the Industry
Guristrimba was blunt about the timeline for normalization. Her projection: disruption lasting “some 3, 4, 5, 6 months.”
The downstream damage extends well beyond the immediate region. The Maldives, one of the world’s most coveted ultra-luxury destinations, faces serious risk. With many routes through the Middle East now severed, the path from a massive feeder market has effectively closed.
“There is no way to get from Eastern Europe to the Maldives at all,” Guristrimba said. “And that’s a huge market for the Maldives.”
One clear behavioral shift has already taken hold: the universal demand for refundable rates.
“They’re asking for refundable rates in case something happens and they won’t be able to fly,” Guristrimba said — even for destinations far removed from the conflict zone. “We’re asking for refundable rates everywhere, even though it’s a little bit more expensive.”
The broader message to the advisor community is to expect this reliable unreliability as the new baseline.
“Since the beginning of the year, every few weeks something is happening,” Guristrimba said.
But Guristrimba, who has navigated Covid, Ukraine, and now this, isn’t catastrophizing. She’s just been here before.
“We have seen this before, so we know what to do and what to expect,” she said. “It’s not the first time for us, and I really hope it’s the last time.”
The message to clients and travel advisors alike, for now, is straightforward: “We’ll wait and see.”
Related Stories
UK Travel Agencies Follow Their Wealthiest Clients Abroad
United Plans to Add More Planes Than Any Airline by 2028
Fora: Destination Weddings Surge 54% as Couples Ditch Tradition
