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Travelers stranded in the Middle East are racking up mounting bills: ‘That’s a lot of money we were not intending to spend’

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Emilia Vasquez, a business development manager for Goodwill, landed in Dubai on Thursday, February 26. She and her 6-year-old son had flown in to celebrate her birthday, and they were planning to stay until Tuesday.

Two days later, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and everything changed — across the Middle East, airspaces shut down, airports closed, and thousands of travelers, like Vasquez, found themselves stuck in place.

As they navigated the logistics of getting stranded, they also faced another issue: the cost of getting stranded.

In a statement on March 1, the General Civil Aviation Authority of the United Arab Emirates, or GCAA, announced that the State would be bearing “all hosting and accommodation costs for affected and stranded passengers.” The announcement did not specify how or when travelers would be reimbursed.

For Vasquez, the flight cancellations meant watching her hotel stay grow longer by the day. She was staying at Taj Dubai hotel, a 5-star hotel near the Dubai Mall, and spending about $500 a day, roughly $300 of which went to her hotel bill. As of Thursday, she had spent $6,800.

With bills racking up and no immediate money from the Emirati government, she was only a few thousand dollars away from her credit card limit.

“I’m being responsible for paying for this hotel, the hotel literally telling us that if I cannot afford the hotel to leave and go somewhere else,” Vasquez told Business Insider on Wednesday. “I don’t feel safe to leave the hotel and go somewhere else. So I’ve been extending the days every day.”

With some airlines slowly resuming limited service out of the region, Vasquez managed to leave Dubai on Friday, but for many of the travelers who remain on the ground, bills continue to mount and confusion remains about whether they will be saddled with or reimbursed for these bills.

The Abu Dhabi and Dubai tourist ministries did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. The General Civil Aviation Authority of the United Arab Emirates did not respond to a request for comment.

‘We’re just trying to be as cheap as possible’


Fate Show and her father standing in the Dubai Mall China Town with lanterns hanging behind them.

Fate Show and her father in the Dubai Mall China Town.

Courtesy of Fate Show



While some well-heeled visitors paid six figures to get out of Dubai, others have been funding their extended stays through a mix of credit cards, airline-provided vouchers, and crowdfunding.

As of Saturday, two of the region’s biggest airlines — Emirates and Etihad — have resumed limited flight schedules, prioritizing existing customers. Qatar Airlines remained grounded with the exception of limited flights to Doha. While the airlines haven’t released guidance around obtaining hotel vouchers, several travelers said they’ve been able to receive them.

Fate Show, a Ph.D. student, was flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to London with her dad after seeing her family for Chinese New Year. Their flight was scheduled to stop in Dubai on Saturday afternoon. When she arrived at the airport, she was met with chaos.

Emirates canceled their flight to London and provided a voucher to cover food and a hotel stay at the S Hotel Al Barsha, a 4-star hotel about 20 minutes from Dubai International Airport.

That voucher lasted four nights. On Tuesday, after the voucher ran out, they switched hotels to the Hampton by Hilton Dubai Al Barsha, where they paid for their stay out of pocket. The room, with two single beds, cost $112 a night and included breakfast.

They are trying to limit additional spending on food to $30 a day.

“We’re not trying to do anything fancy,” she said. “We’re just trying to be as cheap as possible.”

She and her father tried to buy new tickets home, but said they were too expensive. On Friday, they moved to the Copthorne Hotel with their Emirates voucher. Her flight has been rescheduled for Tuesday.

Even with the help of the Emirates hotel voucher, Show and her father have had to spend hundreds of dollars during their unexpectedly extended stay in Dubai.

“Obviously, that’s a lot of money we were not intending to spend,” she said. “We’re using a credit card, so we’re hoping to be reimbursed by next month when we repay it.”


Shanice Day in Dubai with an owl

Shanice Day has managed to get a flight to Australia from Dubai, in order to make it back to the US.

Courtesy of Shanice Day



Shanice Day, a stylist from Houston, traveled to Dubai on February 24 to celebrate her 30th birthday with her friend Remy Thomas, staying at the FIVE Luxe hotel near Jumeirah Beach. Their original flight home on March 1 was canceled, along with subsequent rebookings, and they were left paying for their hotel out of pocket.

On Tuesday, Thomas started a GoFundMe to fundraise for their accommodation and flights back. As of Friday, the pair had raised $9,978 of their $11,000 target.

Day managed to secure a flight out of Dubai to Sydney on Thursday. The following day, she flew from Sydney to Los Angeles, the penultimate leg of her round-the-world journey back to Texas.

“I’ll probably get therapy after this experience,” Day told Business Insider. “I know it’s going to take me a while to build up the courage to travel again.”

Shrihari Madhu, the manager of Coral Cove, which rents out three apartments in Dubai Marina, told Business Insider they have been helping tourists stranded by flight cancellations by offering free accommodation or a base fee of around $40 a night. Ordinarily, they rent their properties out for prices starting around $110.

“Many travelers are reaching out because they need an immediate reliable place to stay while navigating these disruptions,” Madhu said.

Madhu said the three apartments are currently occupied by guests whose travel plans were canceled.

The only thing more expensive than staying is leaving

On Monday, as tensions escalated and airspaces across the region shut down, some wealthy travelers in the UAE hired chauffeurs to drive them into Oman and Saudi Arabia. The trips involved hours in the car, including long waits at border crossings.

From there, they chartered private planes, spending upward of $200,000 to make it out, Ameerh Naran, the CEO of Vimana Private Jets, previously told Business Insider.

He said demand to leave the region had started to tick up on Friday, when the possibility of a conflict with Iran became more acute.

“There has been a clear emphasis on speed and certainty of departure, with many clients prioritizing the earliest viable routing rather than specific aircraft types or traditional preferences,” Naran said. “We have also seen increased demand for coordinated ground support to facilitate access to airports where airspace remains open.”




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I’m an American married to a French man. We have a lot in common, but there are a few cultural divides we can’t bridge.

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I moved from New York to Berlin as a single woman in 2017.

Finding love wasn’t at the top of my to-do list, but I was open to the possibility — and aware that the odds of making a dating-app match with someone of another nationality were much higher than if I had stayed stateside.

So I wasn’t exactly surprised when a dashing Frenchman, who’d eventually become my husband, whisked me off my feet.

We managed to ignore the cultural divide during those first six months of honeymoon-phase bliss. It was easy since he was fluent in English and I had a basic knowledge of French, but the longer we went on, the harder it became to pretend we hadn’t had upbringings in countries thousands of miles apart.

We’re lucky to have a lot of common interests and have agreed on our major values since day one — but we’ve come to accept that there are some ways I’ll always be a little too American for him and he a little too French for me.

We have opposite approaches to self-medication


The writer and her husband posing in the bleachers at a sporting event.

The first time my husband saw how much ibuprofen I owned, he was shocked.

Audrey Bruno



Reliable health insurance was never a sure thing for my family when I was growing up.

That meant that we’d often treat illnesses on our own when possible, keeping the medicine cabinet stocked at all times with Costco-sized bottles of every over-the-counter painkiller you can imagine.

I didn’t think twice when I packed my suitcase with several bottles of ibuprofen, but they were a shock to my husband the first time I took one out in front of him.

In France, painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen aren’t easy to buy in bulk or get at the grocery store — and even at pharmacies, you can’t grab them off the shelf yourself.

Instead, you have to get them straight from the pharmacist, who will then typically debrief you on proper usage and dosage.

From his point of view, I take way too much ibuprofen … but on the other hand, the natural remedies he has always used often don’t cut it for me.

Just this week, I came down with a cold, and he brought me a homeopathic essential-oil treatment when I asked him to pick up medicine. I’ve been using it to appease him, but you better believe I also sent him back to get the ibuprofen I really needed.

My husband’s French dining habits are different from my laid-back, American approach

My husband and I often have trouble aligning when and what we eat because of our different appetites and cultural approaches to dining.

In France, eating routines tend to be pretty rigid. Lunch happens at noon sharp, breakfast is always sweet, and the only time of day most people snack is at 4 p.m. for their “goûter” — the childhood habit of taking a sugary, late-afternoon treat that many French folks, including my husband, carry with them long after they’ve left the schoolyard.

My approach, meanwhile, mirrors the free-form way I ate in the US. Snacks are always on hand, breakfast is often skipped, and dinnertime could easily take place early one night and late the next.

Neither of us has been able to fully adapt to the other’s eating style, but we try to make time to enjoy at least one meal together a day — usually dinner. That way, we can find something we agree on, and a time to eat it, and get what we both want the rest of the time.

We often don’t agree on how or when to share our personal space


The writer and her husband kissing on a pathway, with a green landscape in the background.

We’ve been able to bridge the cultural differences we have.

Audrey Bruno



I’ve always had an open-door policy for friends and family, and welcomed the opportunity to hire a housesitter or leave my apartment to a friend to watch my cats when I’m out of town.

I don’t mind if they make themselves at home while they’re at it — whether that means sleeping in my bed or using my shampoo and conditioner — possibly because I grew up watching my own parents always offer the same.

This, however, is out of the realm of possibility for my husband. The first time I proposed such an idea before a long vacation, he shut it down.

“In France, people don’t do that,” he said. “We want to sleep in our own beds at the end of the day.” Friends will swing by to feed the cats and change the litter, but that’s it.

There’s also a limit to how long he feels comfortable hosting guests when we are on the premises — but he’s learned to adapt to longer stays in order to accommodate my loved ones who have to travel from afar.

When we first met, the longest stretch he could tolerate was a long weekend, but we’ve since hosted my California-based siblings for several weeks with no complaints on his end (OK, maybe just a few).

So, although we may both never be totally on board with each other’s cultural quirks, at least we know that we’ll always try to meet in the middle.




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Sam Altman says concerns of ChatGPT’s energy use are overblown: ‘It also takes a lot of energy to train a human’

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Sam Altman is pushing back on the idea that ChatGPT consumes too much energy.

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query,” Altman told The Indian Express last week on the sidelines of a major AI summit. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

Altman suggested it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, arguing that it’s unfair to discount the years spent nurturing and educating someone to be capable of making their own inquiries.

“It takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he said, prompting some laughter in the crowd. “It takes, like, 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Altman said the clock really began thousands of years ago.

“It took, like, the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science or whatever,” he said.

Altman also called out what he said were “totally insane” claims on the internet that OpenAI is guzzling down water to power ChatGPT.

“Water is totally fake,” Altman said, when asked about concerns AI companies use too much water. “It used to be true, we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers, but now that we don’t do that, you know, you see these like things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever.”

In June, Altman said that the average ChatGPT query consumes roughly the amount of energy needed to power a lightbulb for a few minutes.

“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes,” he wrote on X.

Altman said it is fair as a whole to point out the AI industry’s overall energy consumption because of the large growth in usage. He said it’s why he and other AI CEOs have pushed alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.

Unlike other CEOs, namely xAI’s Elon Musk, Altman is dismissive of the idea that space-based data centers are realistic in the next decade, a concept that some companies have floated as a way to reduce energy consumption.

Outside of OpenAI, Altman is a major investor in nuclear energy. He previously served as chairman of Oklo, a nuclear energy startup, and has been a major backer of Helion, which plans to build what it calls “the world’s first fusion power plant” in Washington state.

In the US, data center energy consumption is becoming a major topic. Last month, President Donald Trump said he was working with tech companies on “a commitment to the American people” to ensure that citizens don’t pay higher energy bills because of a nearby data center.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated last year that data centers could account for 14% of total power demand in the US by 2050.




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Naydeline Mejia

My move from the US to Paris has come with a lot of benefits, but finding love has felt impossible

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When I visited Paris for the first time in 2022 during my inaugural solo trip, I fell in love with the city instantly.

Sipping my chocolat chaud while reading Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” at the legendary Café de Flore, enveloped in the charming Haussmannian architecture the city is renowned for, I whispered to myself: “I could live here.”

It wasn’t until two years later that I would finally make the move abroad after being accepted into a graduate school program and subsequently quitting my dream job at a big-time magazine to fulfill my newest dream of living in Paris.

Although moving to France from the US has come with plenty of benefits, such as a slower pace of living and a healthier work-life balance, one part of my journey has significantly suffered: my love life.

For a city that markets itself as the City of Love, I have found building a meaningful connection with someone in Paris nearly impossible.

The language barrier has made it difficult to connect with potential partners deeply


Woman reading book outside at cafe in PAris

I can speak French, but I still feel a language barrier on dates.

Naydeline Mejia



As someone with an intermediate level of French, I knew when entering the Parisian dating scene that language would be a hurdle, especially when going on dates with non-native English speakers.

During dates with people who didn’t feel comfortable speaking English or didn’t speak the language very well, we’d mostly converse in French — I found banter to be difficult and less fluid.

My personality also took a hit. Instead of my usual, flirty self, I felt more reserved because I couldn’t express myself fully in my third language.

Even during dates where the other person did have a good command of English, I felt as though we lacked a certain access to one another as we weren’t able to express ourselves in our mother tongues.

As a result, I convinced myself our connection would never reach deeper than center ground.

I’ve had some great dates, but intimacy doesn’t always translate into romance


Woman smiling in PAris under umbrella

For me, romance has been hard to find in Paris.

Naydeline Mejia



Another barrier to finding love while dating in Paris has been the differing dating customs.

In my experience, it’s not uncommon for French partners to want to go on regular romantic dates and engage in public displays of affection, like holding hands, even if we’re only seeing each other casually.

As someone who is used to clearly defined relationship boundaries and labels, like “friends with benefits” and “exclusive,” while dating in the US, I find it a bit disorienting to receive forms of intimacy usually reserved for a serious relationship from a non-romantic partner.

I have also observed that the “what are we?” conversation is not really common in France. After a few successful dates, it’s often assumed that you and your dating partner are exclusive. In comparison, in the US, a conversation around exclusivity usually precedes becoming “official” with someone.

The lack of a clear conversation around labels has often left me feeling confused about where I stand with potential partners or the relationship feeling unbalanced.

I have considered moving back to the US for a better chance at love


Woman walking next to building in Paris

I’m not sure if I’ll find love in Paris.

Naydeline Mejia



While I can’t say my dating experience was that much better when I was living in the US, I do consider moving back home to New York to increase my chances of finding a meaningful partnership.

In my experience, there are many benefits to dating in your native country — from speaking the same language to upholding similar dating rules and customs, and, oftentimes, having shared experiences that can only be witnessed by someone from your hometown.

At the same time, some of the most beautiful love stories defy cultural and language barriers. I would be remiss not to try to work past the difficult parts of dating abroad in my search for a partner who makes my heart flutter long past the honeymoon stage.

Nevertheless, while concurrently navigating a seemingly never-ending dating pool, I have also been enjoying my alone time in this fairy-tale city.

In her essay, “Why Are All the Lonely Girls Going to Paris?,” writer Jenna Ryu argues that perhaps inhabiting this so-called City of Love is not about finding a storybook romance, but celebrating the beauty of solitude, especially as a young, single woman.

I have never felt more sure of myself and in love with life than during these past two years living in Paris. The love I would often reserve for a romantic partner, I have been pouring onto myself — and that has made all the difference.




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Amanda Goh

Sarah McLachlan, 58, says she had to ‘eat a lot of humble pie’ to repair her relationship with her older daughter

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Sarah McLachlan, 58, says she had to rethink how she was parenting her daughter to rebuild their bond.

“I would have been softer on her in a different way. I was a hard ass,” McLachlan told Amy Poehler on Tuesday’s episode of “Good Hang with Amy Poehler.”

McLachlan shares two daughters with ex-husband Ashwin Sood: India Ann, born in 2002, and Taja Summer, born in 2007.

“It’s funny because I thought so clearly in my own mind that I was being the antithesis of my mother. And I looked at the way she parented, and I thought, ‘I’m going to do everything completely different,'” McLachlan said. “Then her words come spewing out of your mouth in a moment of anger and frustration, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.'”

She said her older daughter would sometimes shut down or lash out when things got hard, and at the time, McLachlan didn’t fully understand what was behind it.

“I looked at that and went, ‘How do I help you with this? How do we move past this, because the world out there is scary and big, and you have to have some grit, and you have to do hard things so that you know you can,'” McLachlan said, describing the tough approach she took with her daughter.

It was only after they went to family counseling that she realized her daughter was experiencing a lot of anxiety.

“The way I was communicating to her was just making her feel shitty about herself instead of building her up, which was completely the opposite of what I thought I was doing,” McLachlan said.

“I had to eat a lot of humble pie and take stock and go, ‘OK, look, I want a relationship with my kid. So, I need to learn how to communicate differently with her,'” she said.

Through the process, she said her daughter also learned how to take responsibility for her own reactions.

“It was a long process, but it was beautiful and powerful. And we have such an open, loving relationship now because of that,” McLachlan said.

This isn’t the first time McLachlan has spoken about her relationship with her firstborn. In August, she told Variety that the chapter of their relationship inspired the second single, “Gravity,” on her latest album, released last year.

“It feels really sweet to be able to sing this song and know that we’re in such a better place, having come through this really challenging time together,” she said.

In September, McLachlan told People that therapy gave her a “safe environment” to connect with her daughter.

“What I realized is the way I was communicating my love to her, she was not hearing it, not feeling it,” McLachlan said. “I was not reaching her. And for me as a parent, that’s devastating because you just want to take your kid in your arms and hold them and keep them in.”

India Sood did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.




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Dan DeFrancesco

Failing fast is a lot harder than it sounds

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“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s famous quote has become Corporate America’s new mantra.

From Okta to Salesforce to Blackstone, executives told BI’s Sarah E. Needleman and Ana Altchek getting it wrong is ok. Just do it quickly and learn from it.

The tech industry has always been a big proponent of failing fast, but Corporate America is now catching on thanks to AI. The tech allows companies to quickly launch new tools to a wide group.

And, perhaps more importantly, it’s a way for executives to prove the big money they are spending on AI isn’t going to waste. (Hence why they want you to fail fast.)

It’s not just for launching products either.

Even the ideation phase can be quickly sped up with chatbots that can talk through ideas. What previously might have taken executives (or, more likely, their underlings) hours of research can get figured out a lot faster.

There are still some hurdles with the fail-fast approach.

What does failing even look like? There isn’t a big, red alarm that goes off every time an AI project fails. (Although that sure would be fun.) Executives will say they set clear guidelines for a prototype beforehand, but a tool’s benefits can be nuanced. And maybe you just need a little bit more time to really make it sing. All that makes it a lot harder to decide when to pull the plug.

Building airplanes in the sky. The rush to get things out can lead to the belief you’ll just fix things on the fly. But that’s a dangerous precedent. Just ask the video game industry. When games came in physical copies you had to blow on to get working, companies made sure their product was bulletproof. Nowadays, they can digitally ship a game knowing an update for a glitch wont be far behind. It’s a dangerous game that can cause major headaches.

Opening the floodgates. A formalized product launch slows things down, but it also makes sure everyone is on the same page. A massive greenlight risks a lack of standardization. That might not seem like a big deal for a prototype. It becomes a bigger problem down the road if the product needs to be reconfigured to fit into the company’s wider tech stack.




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