This Just In…
✈️ Virgin Atlantic’s Dubai-bound Flight to Nowhere
Passengers on board a Virgin Atlantic flight from London Heathrow to Dubai finally returned to the UK after a 16-hour “flight to nowhere”. Thousands of people have been left stranded at airports across the Middle East in the past week, after Iranian strikes targeted the Gulf states in response to a joint Israel-US bombing campaign. Flights were briefly suspended on Saturday morning and passengers were taken into tunnels at Dubai airport, which is normally the busiest global hub in the world, following fresh drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) city. Flight VS400 had taken off from Heathrow at 10.22pm on Friday night for the seven-hour flight to Dubai. But after six hours in the air, while the Airbus A350 was flying over eastern Saudi Arabia, airspace was closed due to the latest attack. The pilots turned around to fly back to London, but they landed at Budapest at 11am on Saturday to refuel. After 90 minutes on the ground, the aircraft took off again for a two-hour flight to Heathrow and landed shortly before 2pm. Virgin Atlantic has now canceled all flights to and from Dubai for the winter, except for one trip next week - The Independent
✈️ GPS Lands Tourists in Big Trouble in Andorra
A group of tourists so willingly followed their GPS instructions that they ended up driving up onto a ski slope. The three women from Taiwan ended up down the side of a mountain in the tiny European country of Andorra while blindly following the instructions of their car’s navigation system in their rented black Mercedes. Read more here
✈️ New US visa bond rules likely to slash African travel
New US rules that require Africans to post deposits of up to $15,000 are likely to deepen a trend of declining visa approvals for the continent’s travelers.
Read more here
✈️ Venezuela Raid Turns Travelers’ Caribbean Getaways Into Ordeals
Jan 5, 2026 - Thousands of travelers are stuck in the Caribbean for a third straight day since the U.S. military operation in Venezuela, during which the Federal Aviation Administration closed parts of Caribbean airspace to U.S. civilian aircraft.
On Sunday and Monday, major airlines were operating extra flights and, in some cases, using larger airplanes to bring back stranded passengers. But the scale of the disruption, which grounded hundreds of flights at the end of the holiday travel season, meant some passengers had to wait days for available seats. Travel insurance was unlikely to reimburse the extra expenses, since most plans exclude coverage for disruptions related to military activity.
Travelers were stuck at airports like Luis Muñoz Marín International near San Juan, P.R., after the United States closed some Caribbean airspace on Saturday during a raid to capture the president of Venezuela. Credit: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters
From family weddings in India to high-level geopolitics in Brussels and reporting trips to South Africa, Preeti Bali has become something of a modern road warrior. But she admits that not long ago she was an anxious traveller. With experience - and the right support from My Savvy Traveller - those nerves gave way to confidence, proving that savvy travel is often the difference between stress and a seamless journey.