Wego's bookings fell as much as 50% after Gulf airspace closed on February 28, wiping out growth that had been running at around 30% entering 2025, CEO Ross Veitch told WiT Phocuswright Middle East in Barcelona this week.

The Dubai-based OTA responded with a 20% headcount cut — a break from its no-layoff policy during COVID — that Veitch framed as a deliberate balance-sheet move, not a retreat.

"My working assumption is this political instability is going to persist," he said. "It's not going to be resolved next weekend."

How hard did the conflict hit Wego's business?

The data Veitch shared on stage charts a sharp shock followed by a partial, uneven recovery. Gulf airfares peaked 50–60% above pre-conflict levels and have settled at 10–20% above, with one exception: connecting traffic through Gulf hubs, where carriers are pricing aggressively to hold volumes.

Inbound travel from Europe, Asia and the Americas — the long-haul demand that fills Dubai's hotels and Emirates' cabins — remains sluggish.

"It's really noticeable, the absence of tourists in Dubai," Veitch said. "It's actually probably the best time to visit as a traveller right now."

Two markets held firm as both origins and destinations: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That data point will shape Wego's near-term strategy, Veitch said. He also flagged the demand-side drag from European travel advisories and corporate travel policies that bar Gulf trips, and called for advisories to be revised quickly.

What did the crisis force Wego to automate?

When Iranian strikes hit UAE data centres, they took down the third-party customer service platform Wego depended on — hosted entirely in the UAE with no multi-regional redundancy — just as tens of thousands of passengers tried to cancel or rebook.

"I took my entire engineering team and compressed our entire automation roadmap into a couple of weeks just to manage the crisis," Veitch said.

The result: roughly 60–70% of customer service issues now resolve without human intervention. At the start of Q2, Wego flipped to 100% agentic engineering — no more manual coding — with engineers overseeing "fleets of agents," a speedup Veitch called dramatic. Virtual employees are being plugged into finance and data teams next, and he expects AI to hollow out middle management's coordination role over time.

Is ChatGPT a distribution channel that works?

Wego has run a ChatGPT plugin for three to four months, and the early returns cut both ways for travel sellers watching AI as a booking channel.

The audience is entirely new — heavily North American, European and Indian, reflecting ChatGPT's demographics rather than Wego's Middle Eastern core. But volumes disappoint, and Veitch blames discovery, not demand: ChatGPT does not contextually suggest third-party plugins unless users seek them out. Organic AI-platform traffic runs roughly 100 times higher than plugin traffic.

The traffic that does arrive converts exceptionally well. Veitch expects a paid placement model to emerge — "if I were there, I would build one" — which would turn AI platforms into a media-buying channel for OTAs.

Can a regional OTA out-innovate the global players?

Against Booking Holdings-scale AI budgets, Veitch argues small size is currently an advantage. "One smart person who knows their way around AI tools can get an incredible amount done. You don't need 100,000 people to compete," he said.

His moat is supplier and customer relationships, disruption-recovery expertise and corridor-specific knowledge — assets no recently released model can replicate. On fundamentals, he remains bullish: young populations, sovereign wealth funds deploying hundreds of billions into tourism infrastructure, and the shared Saudi, UAE and Qatari ambition to become the world's travel hub.

Looking back in twenty years, Veitch expects this period to read as the start of the AI era rather than a Middle East market disruption — "something like the singularity, where AI starts developing AI and it all starts going very fast."

Until then, Wego's near-term playbook is cost discipline and automation, positioned to capture a Gulf recovery that no one can yet time.