The Great Travel Meltdown of 2026

The Great Travel Meltdown of 2026 started taking shape at the end of February. At first, the U.S. war against Iran forced the cancellation or rerouting of many flights to the Middle East; then the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz drove up the price of jet fuel and threatened to cause crises for the major airlines. Though the two-week cease-fire announced last night may reopen the strait, prices are unlikely to rebound immediately.

Separately, large numbers of TSA workers started staying home after a protracted budget fight in Congress left them working without pay for weeks on end. Airport-security lines snaked into terminal basements or out their front doors. President Trump deployed ICE agents at the nation’s major airports, and although TSA workers are now receiving back pay, the funding situation isn’t yet resolved.

Getting somewhere by plane has always been an onerous proposition. If you search the phrase travel chaos on Google News, you will find that headlines about “travel chaos” reoccur in batches about every six months, going back to the beginning of time. But as a result of recent, tragic world events, the state of consumer aviation seems to be deteriorating at a rapid pace. Now Americans with travel plans would like to know exactly how worried they should be, and exactly how worried everyone else already is.

I’m one of the worriers. I’ve been planning to go to Barcelona for my honeymoon this summer. I’ve already read two books about the Spanish Civil War and just started a pretty dry one about the finances of the city’s famous football team. Last week I watched my fiancé spend every Capital One point in his account on our basic-economy flights, because the Google Flights trend line showed the fare for our trip going up, up, up, and headed off the chart.

[Read: The golden age of flying wasn’t all that golden]

So I’ve been in the forums—mostly on Reddit. People there are fretting about the known problems as well as interesting new ones that they came up with themselves. They’re worried, for instance, that an airline might decide to charge them an additional fuel fee upon arrival at the airport, and they don’t want to listen when someone replies, in an effort to be helpful, “Sounds illegal.” They’re worried about successfully flying to Japan but then getting stuck there by a fuel crisis that hits its peak with really, really bad timing (for them personally). In one thread, a commenter stated without explanation that “there is also a slim chance that events outside of our control will make people want to avoid air travel by this summer.” Okay!

Forum members rarely bother to acknowledge the insensitivity of stressing out over the effects of a distant war on your own summer vacation. But once in a while, someone’s post will push things just a little too far: It’s okay to worry that you won’t get to take a trip that you really care about, but it’s not okay to worry that if too many flights are canceled as a result of a distant war, you may lose your hard-earned gold status on the Australian airline Qantas.

Ominous reports of airlines’ crisis-management efforts have been attracting incredible attention. For many, the first big moment in this story was a March 20 memo from United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby that was sent to employees and then published on the company website—the type of thing an ordinary person would never read in ordinary times. According to the memo, jet-fuel prices had more than doubled since the start of the war. (Other sources have different numbers, showing that it had not quite doubled at that time.) Kirby presented this as a major challenge for the company—United might end up spending an extra $11 billion annually on fuel—but also, somehow, as a manageable one. “Demand remains the strongest we’ve ever seen,” Kirby wrote. He added that he was typing his note while listening to his son cheer during a college-basketball game, which he found inspiring. “There’s a part of me that can’t help but feel United is playing offense right now with potentially big rewards at the end.”

Maybe for an airline CEO, higher prices are their own reward. The travel experts I spoke with for this story said that summer flights will be really expensive. Airlines used to hedge against spikes in jet-fuel prices with preemptive financial maneuvers, but they don’t do this so much anymore. Now when fuel prices go up, they just raise fares for passengers instead. Some airlines have added fuel surcharges to the cost of each ticket (though this will be assessed at booking, not when you get to the airport). United Airlines is among those carriers that have raised the fees for checked bags, presumably to make up for some of its increased costs. Alli Allen, a travel adviser, told me via email that prices seemed to be escalating “by the minute!” Recently, she looked at flights for a client, found the price to be too high, and checked back 30 minutes later in the hope that maybe it had dropped. Instead she found that it had gone up by $300.

[Read: Flying is weird right now]

Clint Henderson, a writer and an editor for the popular website The Points Guy, said the same. “I think it’s going to cost a lot more for most people to travel this summer,” he told me. “Whether you’re using points and miles or cash, they’re all going to be higher.” He also expected the travel experience to be stressful, especially if TSA workers end up missing any more paychecks. Although news outlets, airlines, and the TSA itself (through the MyTSA app) offer tools to track security wait times, they can still be difficult to predict. Henderson said that he’d gone to check out the Atlanta airport at the height of the TSA-payment crisis and saw travelers facing an hour-and-a-half wait; then he went back the next day, and it was five minutes. “If this goes on, obviously it would be a disaster for the summer travel season.” When I asked him to rate the potential for chaos on a 10-point scale, he said he would give it a nine. (Take it from a points guy!)

Henderson said The Points Guy website’s official recommendation is that people book all travel for the year right now, even if it seems expensive, because conditions may only worsen over time. To avoid long lines, he also suggested flying out of smaller airports on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Sunday. The other travel trips that I accrued from emailing travel agents and industry bloggers will not impress you. They said to try to sign up for TSA PreCheck or apply for Global Entry, to show up at the airport early, and to bring snacks with you.

Travelers may be complaining, fretting, and catastrophizing, but so far, at least, they are doggedly proceeding with their plans. Airlines report that people are paying the higher ticket prices, and that the industry is seeing record levels of revenue. If Americans can go to Europe this summer, they will go to Europe this summer. And Europe (plus people from many other places) will come here. More than 1 million international travelers are expected to attend the World Cup. Matches will be held in several of the cities that have had the longest security lines, including Houston and Atlanta, and the final will be hosted in the New York–New Jersey area, which is home to the worst airport in America.

A new, more aggressive and pervasive form of travel chaos may yet ensue. In the meantime, though, behaviors are unchanged. Despite the rising prices, the spectacular security lines, and all of the rumored airport inconveniences, “we’ve seen very little evidence that people are canceling or toning down their summer travel plans,” Henderson said. “I’m constantly shocked by Americans’ insatiable demand for travel.”