War, oil, and an unpaid TSA: The perfect storm of travel chaos feels like the pandemic all over again

A regional war filled with missiles and drones flying overhead has dismantled the Middle Eastern airspace. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has sent oil costs skyrocketing. A partial government shutdown has left 50,000 TSA agents working without pay for more than a month. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once, forcing travelers to rethink their plans as the landscape begins to mirror something we’ve experienced a few years earlier during the pandemic.

“It’s a crazy situation,” said Eric Napoli, Chief Legal Officer at AirHelp, the world’s largest flight compensation platform. “Different situations in different places in the world are all convening at once.”

Napoli said that more travelers have been turning to AirHelp in recent months to recover money lost due to flight disruptions. Again, the combination of a war grounding flights and driving up fuel costs, coupled with ongoing conflicts in Mexico, government workers calling out sick after a month and counting of working without pay, and poor weather conditions, has led to a perfect storm that hasn’t been seen since COVID-19 saw the world come to a standstill. Above all, Napoli said, we’re all asking the same question we asked back then: when is it going to end?

“The sensation of the pandemic is similar in the sense that we’re like, oka...