Aussie tourists warned over 'Trump travel tax' as missile threats continue
Sitting at my boarding gate doomscrolling social media, I saw the worst possible alert appear in my feed.
After Googling my flight out of Madrid the previous night to learn it was cancelled, I had already scrambled to get a new flight to Barcelona to begin my journey back home to Australia. But things were about to get really bad.
Sitting in Doha International Airport in Qatar with about 30 minutes left to board my Sydney-bound flight, I read a tweet saying the Qatari government had just closed the country's airspace due to imminent missile launches from Iran targeting US military bases in the country.
None of the passengers around me knew it yet – and there was certainly no announcement over the loud speaker at the airport – but we were about to find ourselves in the middle of what the airline would later call "one of the most severe and complex operational challenges in modern aviation history".
The airport is one of the world's busiest and most connected global aviation hubs. At the time, over 90 Qatar Airways flights carrying more than 20,000 passengers to Doha, were forced to divert immediately. Inside the airport, there was some 10,000 passengers with the airline now in complete limbo.
Slowly it became clear no one was going anywhere. And nobody had any answers about when we could or how exactly that would happen.
RELATED: Advice to Aussie travellers heading to Europe and Middle East
Qatar Airways said it deployed extra staff to deal with the massive disruption but at the same time some of the flight crews had timed out of legal operating hours.
At one point, myself and countless other trying to get back to Sydney queued for hours on hopes of being issued a new boarding pass only for that queue to be told to disband and move further down the terminal empty handed.
"Someone had to step up."
As people grew increasingly agitated by the lack of information, things started unravelling and passengers were forced to help take control of the situation. I soon found myself standing behind the desks of frantic airline staff as a Danish passenger (who was moving to Sydney for two years) and I passed along new boarding tickets from a nearby desk where they were slowly being spat out down to the counter where a sole Qatar Airways employee was processing each new traveller.
An Australian woman, who had taken it upon herself to make a list of passenger details and bring some order to the chaos, stood next to worker at the desk facilitating the whole thing. She later told me she has such a bad back that she sometimes requires a wheelchair.
"Someone had to step up," she said.
As I waited for my boarding pass behind the staff desks watching the queues of desperate travellers, at one point I accidentally lent up against the door setting off an alarm. It spoke to the craziness of the moment that most people barely seemed to notice the extra noise.
While the Qatar Airways staff member did an incredible job, there was a severe lack of leadership on the ground and zero proactive communication to stranded customers. Some airport staff appeared more concerned about instructing passengers to delete videos they witnessed them taking of the chaotic scenes inside the airport.
Once airspace reopened shortly after midnight on Tuesday (local time) diverted aircraft began returning to the hub. In the words of Qatar Airways CEO Badr Mohammed Al-Meer in a self-congratulatory statement on Thursday, "each arrival [was] a step towards reassembling our operation."
About 36 hours after arriving in Doha, I touched down in Sydney after being one of the lucky passengers to get on the next available flight.
According to reports, the missiles that brought the global travel hub to a halt were largely a symbolic act of retribution from Iran against US president Trump's air strikes on nuclear facilities in the country.
For some, it was another example of how perhaps no one is immune to the vicissitudes of Donald Trump's return to power and the newly unpredictable nature of the White House and its foreign policy.
Due to the Trump administration's brutal border regime which is detaining and deporting people, including an Australian journalist recently, travellers have been warned about preparing themselves for difficulties when entering the US, but those travelling elsewhere can still feel his impact.
It must be said the man likes a tax. Usually on his own consumers in the form of a tariff. Trump also wants to tax foreign holders of US assets with a new law contained in the so-called 'big beautiful bill' (something that could hit your superannuation account, although Trump appeared to back away from that on Friday).
And as missiles continue to fly in the Middle East and Iran on Friday threatened to keep attacking US bases, perhaps you could call this current airspace instability a kind of Trump travel tax. Myself and countless others paid it in full this week.
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But inevitably the significant portion of our realisation of net zero will come from carbon credits and the CORSIA scheme (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation), which has been introduced and endorsed by the United Nations and all member states. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
