'No one is going to want to fly if there is risk of a missile attack': can the Gulf's show season hold its visitors?

WETEX opens at the Dubai World Trade Centre on Tuesday, and ADIPEC follows at the ADNEC Centre in Abu Dhabi from 2 to 5 November, organised by dmg events and hosted by ADNOC. Their sites continue to advertise the shows: WETEX's site had registration open and the floor plan published when we checked on 15 October, ADIPEC's has visitor and delegate registration open, with opening hours listed for all four days, and the Emirates news agency WAM set out the November dates at ADNEC in July. The season opens into a war that began on 28 February between the United States, Israel and Iran. Houthi strikes have killed at least 17 people at Riyadh's main airport since 8 October, and the airport remains shut with no confirmed reopening date. For exhibitors deciding whether to fly, the evidence splits three ways, and most of it does not point at Dubai.

What has actually been hit

The Houthi campaign is real, and it is aimed at Saudi Arabia. A strike on Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport on Thursday 8 October killed three Saudi nationals, the BBC reported on 11 October. A second strike on Saturday 10 October killed 13 people and injured 308, the deadliest single attack on a Gulf Arab country since the February war began. A third projectile hit Passenger Hall 4 on 11 October, killing one and injuring 11. The Houthis also attacked Dammam airport and oil facilities, and their spokesman warned airlines off Saudi airports and airspace, naming every airport but Mecca and Medina a target.

Riyadh's airport remains closed. Saudi Arabia's aviation regulator, GACA, says operations stay suspended while safety checks are completed, with no confirmed reopening date. Arabian Business reported on 13 October that Etihad has cancelled its Abu Dhabi-Riyadh flights until 19 October and cut Dammam and Jeddah services, Qatar Airways has suspended Riyadh and Dammam, Gulf Air has cancelled Riyadh until 17 October, and Riyadh Air has scrubbed services including Dubai and London. Abha, Jizan and Najran airports in the south have been closed since earlier attacks.

The United Arab Emirates is a different picture. No Houthi strike on UAE territory has been reported in the past month in any source we fetched. The emirates have not escaped the war untouched: the aviation risk database Safe Airspace records that UAE airspace closed and reopened several times between February and July, and that debris from intercepted drones fell in Abu Dhabi in March. But Dubai International and Abu Dhabi's Zayed International remain operational, Emirates, Etihad, flydubai and Air Arabia are flying much of their networks, and Gulf News summarised on 8 October that life inside the UAE remains normal, with no general shutdown. The danger is closer to the water: Al Jazeera reported on 14 October that two vessels were sunk in the Strait of Hormuz this week, and a tanker was struck by projectiles about 94km off Qatar on 8 October.

The travel advice, and the insurance question

The UK's FCDO does not advise against travel to any part of the UAE, nor to Qatar; its UAE page, last updated 24 July, tells British nationals to be prepared for flight cancellations, periodic airspace closures and short-notice changes. Saudi Arabia is now in a different category: the FCDO page there, updated 13 October, advises against all but essential travel to Riyadh, Aseer, Najran and Jizan provinces, to Taif, Jeddah and Dammam, and to every Saudi airport except Medina. The US State Department has the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all at Level 3, Reconsider Travel, and on 2 March ordered non-emergency government employees out of the UAE and Qatar, noting Iran's stated intention to target US-associated locations in the UAE. Australia also has all three countries at Reconsider your need to travel, and records that military strikes have occurred towards targets in the UAE.

For insurance, nothing is automatic. The FCDO warns that your travel insurance could be invalidated if you travel against its advice. Whether cover is actually affected depends on the insurer's terms, on whether the trip was booked before any advice change, and on whether the travel is essential. Because the FCDO's advice against travel currently touches only Saudi territory, travellers to WETEX and ADIPEC have no FCDO advice to travel against today - which is not a guarantee of cover. The American and Australian level-3 warnings are not the FCDO trigger, but some policies carry their own exclusions, and Smartraveller tells Australians to check they will be covered before travelling to or transiting a 'reconsider your need to travel' destination. If the FCDO ever advises against all but essential travel to the UAE, that is the moment to re-read the policy and speak to the insurer: from that point, many British policies may exclude the trip.

Getting there: the departure boards have thinned

Dubai's airport is open; many of its foreign carriers are not. As of 2 October, 15 international airlines still had Dubai flights suspended, Time Out Dubai reported: British Airways until 3 November; Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and SWISS, Eurowings and Aegean until 23 or 24 October; Air Canada to late March 2027; Cathay Pacific to 31 January; Finnair all winter; Korean Air until further notice; a Singapore Airlines service (SQ494/SQ495) to 1 December; United and Virgin Atlantic not before 2027. Wizz Air resumes on 24 October. Those end-dates are a snapshot, not a promise: Air France briefly resumed its Paris route in late August, then reimposed the suspension on 3 September.

The gap is being filled from this end. Emirates has restored 97 per cent of its global network, and Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism said on 13 September that load factors at Dubai International are approaching 2025 levels, with the airport operating at close to full capacity. Time Out Dubai reports Emirates and flydubai running wide-ranging schedules. On our reading, European visitors in WETEX week will mostly arrive on Emirates, flydubai and the other carriers still serving the city, or connect through hubs such as Istanbul or Doha.

Europe's regulator has drawn its line through the sea, not the land. EASA conflict-zone bulletin 2026-07R3, issued on 14 July and valid to 16 November, tells operators to avoid the waters of the Persian Gulf inside the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait flight-information regions except to the extent necessary for arrivals and departures, and its 31 August revision explicitly reopened flights to and from Gulf airports. The residual risks EASA names are missile and drone attacks, air-defence activity, misidentification and falling debris, with caution advised over land. Journeys are longer, with Europe-Asia traffic bending south through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and GPS jamming reported widely across the region.

What happened the last time the Houthis hit the Gulf

In January 2022, a Houthi drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi killed three people at an ADNOC fuel depot and set fire to an airport extension while Expo 2020 Dubai was running. The Houthis claimed, without evidence, to have struck Dubai's airport too, and threatened the Expo site itself that month. The fair kept its doors open: it had recorded 10,836,389 visits by 24 January 2022, a week after the attack, and closed in March with more than 24 million visits. Those are cumulative figures: they show visits continued and the fair ran to its planned end; they cannot show whether attendance rose or fell after the strike, and we draw no conclusion either way.

The differences between then and now are ours to state, not the data's. January 2022 was not one morning and out: the Wikipedia record shows the UAE intercepting further Houthi missiles over Al Dhafra on 24 January, and the threat against the Expo site came days later. Even so, that crisis killed three people; October 2026 is a running war in which Saudi airports have been struck repeatedly and with mass casualties. The 2022 numbers are a record of continuity under a shorter, smaller crisis, not a forecast for this one.

What the season is worth, and what is being done

The season is worth real money. Dubai World Trade Centre said on 8 June that its 108 large-scale events produced a record AED25.03 billion of economic output in 2025, AED14.66 billion of it value added, drawing 2.18 million attendees, 947,000 of them from abroad. WETEX alone counted 3,100 exhibitors and more than 50,000 visitors in its 2025 edition; ADIPEC's own headline figures claim 239,000-plus attendees and US$53 billion of business deals. Dubai recorded 6.97 million international overnight visitors in the first eight months of 2026, DET said on 13 September; August, at 869,000, was the best month since February, hotel occupancy has climbed from 36 per cent in March to 66 per cent, and the government has put AED2.5 billion into tourism support.

The rest of the calendar points the same way. GITEX, Dubai's technology colossus, is not in its usual October slot, but its move to 7-11 December was announced in October 2025 for the new Dubai Exhibition Centre, a year before the escalation. Arabian Travel Market ran at the World Trade Centre in mid-September. The one show bending is Riyadh's Future Investment Initiative, on 26-29 October: Reuters reported on 13 October that it will run as a hybrid event so executives can attend remotely, and that some may fly into airstrips outside Riyadh and drive in - a decision that now has an official echo: the FCDO's 13 October update advises against all but essential travel to Riyadh province. We found no report in the sources checked of an exhibitor or delegation withdrawing from WETEX or ADIPEC.

What the region is saying

The sharpest warning came from Dubai's own airport chief. "No one is going to want to fly if there is risk of a missile attack," Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai Airports, told Reuters, The National reported on 12 October, as Gulf airlines cancelled their Riyadh services. He was speaking about the Saudi closures, not about WETEX or ADIPEC, but it is the question every exhibitor booking a flight is now asking.

The Houthis have made their threat explicit. "The airports and airspace are exposed to targeting and constitute a theatre of operations for our forces, with the exception of Mecca and Medina," their military spokesman Yahya Saree posted on X, Middle East Eye reported on 11 October. In Riyadh, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman told the WPC Energy Congress on Monday 12 October: "The events of recent weeks are serious. Our response must be equally serious," the BBC reported.

The UAE's business leaders talk about recovery, though they spoke before the October strikes. Asked whether travel demand would return, flydubai chief executive Ghaith Al Ghaith told Gulf News on 16 September: "Definitely with a vengeance. I think a lot of it will come back. Some of it has already come back." Emaar founder Mohamed Alabbar gave Reuters the hotel numbers on 21 September: "During the war, we crashed down to 20, 25. Now we're back to about 60% occupancy."

The economist Nasser Saidi struck the balance on 3 October: "Dubai welcomed 6.97mn international overnight visitors between January-August 2026, but international visitor flows remain substantially below pre-conflict levels." WETEX's founder and chairman, DEWA chief executive Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, sets out the show's pitch on its own site: "It brings together businesses, government entities, investors, experts and decision-makers."

Our reading

On this evidence, the physical risk to a visitor inside Dubai or Abu Dhabi next week cannot be quantified, and neither can any effect on attendance. No Houthi strike on UAE territory has been reported in the past month, both emirates' airports are open, the FCDO is not advising against travel to the UAE, and EASA permits arrivals and departures. That does not add up to low risk: the US and Australia both place the UAE at level three, and the US reports a stated Iranian intention to target US-associated locations there. An absence of reported strikes is an absence of reports, not a measurement. What the evidence does show is the cost of access: fewer direct flights and longer routings, plus the chance that a single overnight escalation rewrites the map. The named risks to watch are the Houthi warning against Saudi airports, the Hormuz attacks - only 2.9 million barrels transited on 11 October against a pre-war average of 17.1 million - and the US decision on striking the Houthis, which Donald Trump says he will make quickly, having ruled out attacking Iran before the 3 November midterms.

Disclosure: The Stratawire is covering WETEX in Dubai from 20 to 22 October. Our reading for travellers deciding whether to fly: fly a carrier still serving the UAE, book refundable rooms, carry insurance confirmed in writing to cover a level-three destination, monitor FCDO alerts and EASA bulletins daily, and avoid any routing through Riyadh. If the FCDO ever moves the UAE to all-but-essential-travel, that is the moment to reassess, for safety and because from that point many British policies may exclude the trip. The events remain scheduled. Whether the risk is worth taking is a judgement each exhibitor must make; on today's evidence, nobody can put a number on it.

By The Stratawire newsroom.