Dubai Just Wrote Off Twenty-Five Million Passengers

Dubai International has abandoned the forecast it started the year with. Chief executive Paul Griffiths says the airport now expects around 70 million passengers for 2026, against the near-100 million it had been targeting and the 95.2 million it actually handled last year. The first half tells you where the damage happened: DXB processed 31.5 million passengers between January and June, down from 46 million over the same period a year earlier. That is not a soft patch in demand. That is an airport that spent months unable to operate normally.

The cause was the Iran war and the repeated closures of Gulf airspace that came with it. DXB’s entire model depends on being a connecting point between Europe, Asia and Africa, which means it depends on corridors overhead staying open. When airspace closes, the traffic does not divert to Dubai — it stops moving through the region altogether, or routes around it at a cost that makes some itineraries uneconomic. An airport with sixty per cent transfer traffic is unusually exposed to exactly this, and it showed.

The recovery numbers are the more hopeful part of the picture. Capacity is back to around 84 per cent of pre-war levels and passenger volumes to roughly 78 per cent, which means airlines have restored schedules faster than travellers have returned to book them. Griffiths has been emphatic that DXB will hold its position as the world’s busiest international airport regardless, and on current trajectories that looks safe — the gap to the nearest rival was large enough to absorb a year this bad. The 100 million milestone simply moves to 2027.

For passengers the practical residue of 2026 is schedule fragility rather than price. Emirates and flydubai rebuilt their networks around whatever routings were available, and some of those compromises are still in the timetable — longer sectors, shifted departure times, and connections with less slack than they used to have. Anyone building an itinerary through Dubai this autumn should look closely at connection times rather than assuming the generous buffers that used to be standard at the airport.

Sources: The National, Zawya