Travel agencies in Flanders report little demand for Dubai as the winter season gets under way, with the Middle East conflict still weighing on bookings. Yet official figures from the emirate point to a broader tourism recovery, highlighting a growing gap between international visitor numbers and European travellers’ perception of the region.
Dubai traditionally enters its busiest tourism season in October, when temperatures become more comfortable after the summer heat. For Belgian holidaymakers, the United Arab Emirates has long been a popular winter destination, particularly among travellers looking for luxury, sunshine and high-end hotels.
This year, however, Belgian travel agencies say the start of the season is unusually quiet. The war involving Iran, Israel and the United States and the wider instability across the Gulf have made many travellers reluctant to book holidays in the region.
At Pegase, a luxury tour operator with a substantial customer base in the province of Antwerp, the usual promotional campaigns for Dubai have generated little response. Co-CEO Els Lenaerts said the company would normally be offering discounts around this time of year, but that customers were showing little interest and the market was clearly not responding to Dubai.
The Association of Flemish Travel Agencies (Vereniging Vlaamse Reisbureaus, VVR) estimates that bookings to the Middle East are down by between 30% and 40% compared with the same period last year. According to managing director Koen van Den Bosch, Dubai and the wider region are still performing relatively well as transit hubs for travellers continuing to Asia, Africa, or Australia, with those bookings approaching pre-war levels.
For leisure travel, however, the picture is very different.
Conflict has changed perceptions
The United Arab Emirates was directly affected by the regional conflict earlier this year. After the United States and Israel launched major attacks on Iran at the end of February, Iran retaliated against targets in the region, including US-linked facilities in the UAE. Dubai also experienced incidents, including damage to the Fairmont The Palm hotel caused by drone debris, prompting evacuations and cancellations.
Although the situation subsequently calmed, the security concerns have continued to influence travel decisions.
Lenaerts said the travel industry understood why customers were worried, while stressing that Dubai itself was not a war zone. She pointed to recent visits by Belgian travel professionals, who had reported a normal holiday experience with the service and events for which Dubai is known.
She also noted that several neighbouring European countries had issued more favourable travel advice, while Belgium‘s Foreign Affairs Ministry continued to advise against non-essential travel to the UAE. Belgium’s latest published update, dated 5 August, says the situation remains unpredictable and warns that new attacks are possible, including the possibility of sudden airspace closures.
A Belgian entrepreneur based in Dubai, Nicolas Vandenabeele, believes the destination is also suffering from a perception problem. Events elsewhere in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf can lead potential visitors to assume that the entire Middle East is affected, he said. Changes and cancellations by airlines have further contributed to uncertainty.
Dubai says visitors are coming back
There is, however, another side to the story.
Dubai’s own tourism figures show that international visitor numbers have been recovering steadily since the sharp disruption earlier this year. The emirate recorded approximately 869,000 international overnight visitors in August, its strongest monthly figure since February. That brought international arrivals during the first eight months of 2026 to 6.97 million. Visitor numbers have recorded double-digit month-on-month growth since March, according to figures from Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism (DET).
Hotel occupancy has followed the same trajectory. It reached 66% in August, compared with just 36% in March. August’s occupancy was still below the 2025 level, but represented 89% of the occupancy recorded in August last year. Dubai’s hotels recorded 21.61 million occupied room nights between January and August, while the city’s hotel inventory approached 149,000 rooms.
Western Europe was actually Dubai’s largest source region during the first eight months of the year, accounting for 20% of international visitors. South Asia accounted for 17%, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries for 16%, and Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova until April 2027, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan), and Eastern Europe for 14%.
Dubai’s tourism authorities presented the figures as evidence that the destination was recovering despite the conflict in the wider region. Travel trade professionals from more than 40 countries attended the Arabian Travel Market in Dubai in September, where the emirate promoted its tourism offering for the remainder of 2026 and beyond.
That recovery is also reflected in international travel-trade reporting. Recommend, a US travel-adviser publication, described Dubai’s hotel and visitor numbers as trending upwards despite the city’s proximity to the conflict.
Different markets, different reactions
The contrasting figures suggest that Dubai’s tourism downturn has not been uniform.
For Dubai’s highly international visitor market, the recovery is already well under way. For Belgian leisure travellers booking through traditional travel agencies, however, the war and uncertainty appear to be having a much stronger effect.
The difference may partly reflect the role of Dubai as an international aviation hub. Travellers who are already flying to Asia, Africa or Australia may continue to use Dubai for connections even if they would not choose the emirate itself for a holiday. Flemish travel agencies say that this business has recovered much more strongly than leisure bookings.
There are also signs that some governments are becoming less restrictive in their advice. New Zealand, for example, has lowered its UAE advice to “exercise increased caution”, although it continues to warn about the unpredictable security situation, possible drone and missile attacks and the risk of airspace closures.
Australia, meanwhile, continues to advise travellers to reconsider their need to travel to the UAE because of the regional security situation.
The result is a complicated picture: Dubai is attracting hundreds of thousands of international visitors each month again, but that does not necessarily mean that demand has returned evenly across all markets.
Cheaper holidays for those willing to go
For travellers who are prepared to accept the uncertainty, the slowdown in demand is producing cheaper holidays.
Van Den Bosch said Dubai was now available at prices that would have been difficult to imagine a year earlier. He expects the Flemish travel sector itself to absorb the loss of Dubai business, as customers can shift their spending to other destinations in a similar price range.
Lenaerts said Pegase was already seeing stronger demand for destinations in the Indian Ocean, with Mauritius particularly popular. The Canary Islands remained another strong performer, while requests for Egypt had also increased noticeably.
For the small group of travellers who remain determined to visit Dubai, the current market can therefore offer opportunities. Lenaerts said hotels and airlines were being particularly flexible, including allowing bookings to be moved to different dates without additional charges, sometimes even shortly before departure.
The contrast is striking. Dubai’s tourism machine is recovering, but Belgian holidaymakers have yet to return in the same numbers. For the emirate, the challenge is therefore not simply attracting visitors again, but convincing hesitant European leisure travellers that the destination is sufficiently removed from the wider regional conflict to make them comfortable booking a winter holiday.
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