When airspace closures began spreading across the Gulf in late February 2026, thousands of travellers found themselves mid-booking, mid-journey, or desperately trying to reach home.
For our customer service team, the weeks that followed would be unlike anything we had experienced before.
Here’s how we responded to the crisis and, in the process, learned how to better serve our customers.
An unprecedented surge during crisis
We logged in the region of 52,000 involuntary requests — cancellations and changes forced by the disruption rather than chosen by travellers.
Around 34,000 bookings were disrupted across the Gulf and around 30,000 of those flagged for proactive outreach.
On a normal day, our team handles around 2,600 support cases.
As flight disruptions across the Gulf cascaded, that number climbed to a peak of around 11,000 cases in a single day — roughly four times our normal load — before beginning to ease toward roughly 6,000 daily by mid-June as the recovery took hold.
On our busiest day alone, the team answered 1,199 phone calls, an all-time high.
Clearing the backlog
At the height of the disruption, our email queue grew to more than 9,000 unanswered messages and our booking backlog reached nearly 1,500 open cases.
Neither figure was acceptable to us, and we moved quickly to bring them down.
Within about three weeks, the email backlog had fallen to roughly 1,700 — a reduction of around 87% — and the booking backlog had dropped from 1,492 to 185, an 88% reduction.
That progress didn’t happen automatically. It required a fundamental rethink of how we were working, and the willingness of people across the whole company to pitch in.
Putting urgent travellers first
One of the clearest lessons from the early days was that a traveller departing in two hours has a fundamentally different need from one whose trip is three weeks away.
We rebuilt our live chat with a new automated priority queue that routes anyone departing within 48 hours to the front of the line, so the most time-critical cases reach us first.
At the same time, we built Wego Copilot — an AI assistant that drafts replies for our agents, set up backup phone lines when telephony went down, and automated our most common workflows: from refunds and airline circulars to proactive comms and travel-disruption banners.
The goal was to give travellers clear, consistent answers as quickly as possible, freeing our human agents to focus on the cases that genuinely needed them.
Resolving refunds and reaching out
Refunds were, understandably, among the most anxious queries we received
By mid-June, nearly 19,000 refund cases had been executed.
The remainder are still in progress; refund timelines are ultimately determined by each airline’s own processing, and we continue to follow up on every open case.
We also recognised that waiting for travellers to contact us wasn’t enough.
We proactively sent nearly 15,000 emails to affected travellers with updates relevant to their bookings, so that as many people as possible had the information they needed before they had to ask for it.
One team
During the crisis, in addition to our core customer service team, more than 100 colleagues from across Wego — product, engineering, operations, and beyond — volunteered their time to help manage the load.
Having people step in from different parts of the business meant we could maintain the breadth of our support even as volumes surged.
That kind of response isn’t something you can plan for in a playbook.
We are grateful to every colleague who raised their hand.
Looking ahead
The Middle East crisis tested our team in ways we hope not to repeat, but it also showed us where our systems were strong and where they needed to grow.
The automations we built under pressure are now part of how we work. The priority queue is here to stay.
To every traveller who reached out during this period: thank you for your patience. We heard you, and we’re still working for anyone whose journey isn’t fully resolved.