After weeks of painstaking planning, Ireland ex-pats Geraldine and Tom were all prepped and ready to tie the knot in their homeland when boom! … 28 February dawned and conflict broke out in the Middle East.
As they watched news break of drone and missile strikes closing airspace throughout the Persian Gulf, Geraldine knew they had a problem.
“We were pretty concerned straight away because we were due to travel to Dubai, with a stopover there before our connecting flight onwards to Ireland. We were due to leave Sydney on March 10th and fly into Dublin Airport on the 11th,” she said.
They began checking the Emirates website and app for travel disruption updates, then the notification they’d been dreading came through – the airline was effectively grounded but they could request a refund for their cancelled flights.
Rebooking with Emirates was out of the question. Even if the region’s airspace reopened in time, there was “no way” the couple wanted to risk flying over the Middle East.
“It was honestly pretty devastating at first,” Geraldine explains. “Your wedding day is something you spend so long planning and looking forward to, so hearing that our flights to Dublin had been cancelled and that we might not make it in time was incredibly stressful.”
After a moment of panic and wondering how they were going to get to their Dublin wedding, the couple scrambled to work out what options they had.
