by Padraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

In the last six years alone we’ve had Covid, Ukraine, Israel, tariffs, Venezuela, Greenland and now Iran. Layer onto that the existential debates around climate and AI and you begin to understand why the question keeps surfacing: should we be worried for our industry?

The short answer is yes. Not to be worried would suggest a kind of delusional recklessness more commonly associated with political leadership than with those of us who actually have to run businesses, manage risk and deliver programmes.

But perspective helps.

When I started in the early 1990s, Ireland, the destination I was trying to sell, still carried a faint but unmistakable whiff of cordite from “the Troubles”. Over 3,500 lives lost across three decades. Not exactly an easy sell.

And yet by the late-noughties, Ireland was flying. Incentive programmes from the US, Canada, Britain and mainland Europe flooded in. Five-star availability became a scarce commodity. Northern Ireland, a little slower to catch the wave, soon found its own rhythm, with Belfast turning its most painful history into compelling visitor experiences – next time you visit, try the legendary Black Taxi Tour.

Then came 9/11.

For a period, the entire premise of incentive travel – putting groups of people on planes for reward and recognition – felt almost untenable. And yet by 2003 the industry was stirring again. By 2005, it was back on its feet and dancing.

The Global Financial Crisis in 2008–09. The Arab Spring in 2011. Each one disruptive. Each one, at the time, existential. And then Covid, which made all of the above look like minor interruptions. Every single time, the industry came back.

Not always quickly. Not always to the same destinations. Not always in the same form. But it came back.

If you’re looking for a phrase to capture this, SITE coined one in our “What’s in the Mix for 2026” analysis: successful incentive travel professionals have perfected the art of agility and nimbleness. That isn’t a slogan. It’s muscle memory. Earned the hard way.

Which brings us, somewhat reluctantly, to the current situation in the Middle East.

Following Iran’s retaliatory strikes, the immediate impact was brutally familiar: airspace closures, travel advisories, corporate freezes, cancellations stacking up across key destinations. As Skift noted in their recent analysis, travel is a confidence industry and confidence drains fast in moments like these.

But here’s where nuance matters.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi are not emerging or peripheral destinations. They are among the most established, best-resourced and most deeply embedded business events destinations in the world. Abu Dhabi triumphantly hosted SITE’s most recent global conference. Dubai has been hosting major global congresses, incentive programmes and corporate events for decades. This is infrastructure built over decades – convention centres, hotel inventory, airlift connectivity – and, crucially, trust built over time with planners, agencies and corporate clients.

That trust is not theoretical. It shows up in behaviour.

Skift’s modelling highlights the importance of brand familiarity in recovery. Destinations with deep reservoirs of trust and recognition rebound faster. Dubai, in particular, is forecast to recover demand rapidly even exceeding pre-crisis levels within a year under certain scenarios. That’s not optimism; it’s pattern recognition.

Contrast that with destinations still in the process of establishing themselves. Where familiarity is shallow, a crisis doesn’t interrupt demand, it suppresses it entirely. There is no reservoir to draw from.

Skift outlines three possible paths forward: a contained episode with a relatively swift rebound; a more prolonged disruption with slower recovery; or a structural shift requiring years to rebuild. The key insight isn’t choosing which scenario you prefer, it’s knowing how to recognise when one becomes another.

That’s where many organisations fall down. Planning for the best-case scenario without identifying the signals that indicate things are deteriorating is, bluntly, a failure of discipline.

And discipline matters more than ever.

In that same “What’s in the Mix for 2026” analysis, we described the current environment as a “polycrisis as operating system.” Not a series of isolated shocks, but a constant backdrop of volatility: geopolitics, elections, tariffs, supply chains. Shorter horizons. Higher risk. This is not temporary.

Risk assessment, duty of care, contingency planning are no longer add-ons. They are structural components of every programme we design and deliver. EY’s framing of a volatile, ambiguous operating environment simply reinforces what most of us already feel instinctively.

So yes, we should be worried.

But the nature of that worry matters.

The best professionals in our industry are not paralysed. They are calibrated. They are doing several things at once: monitoring developments closely; resisting the temptation to cancel reflexively in destinations with proven recovery profiles; and having clear, direct conversations with clients about safety frameworks, contingency planning and decision points.

They are, in other words, sequencing their response.

And sequencing is everything.

There’s a temptation in moments like this to act quickly, visibly, decisively. But premature action whether it’s cancelling programmes or launching reassurance campaigns before concerns are properly addressed, can do more harm than good. The order in which you act matters as much as the action itself and history bears this out.

Ireland in the 1990s. New York post-9/11. Asia after SARS. The Gulf after previous shocks. Again and again, destinations and operators who managed recovery well didn’t necessarily spend more or shout louder. They sequenced better.

That’s the real lesson.

In a world where disruption is no longer exceptional but expected, our competitive advantage doesn’t lie in avoiding crises because that’s beyond our control. It lies in how we respond to them. How we read the signals. How we hold our nerve. How we move, neither too fast nor too slow, but at the right moment.

So yes, be worried.

But be usefully worried.

Because if there’s one thing our industry has shown, time and again, it’s this: we don’t just endure shocks. We learn from them. We adapt. And, more often than not, we come back stronger not by accident, but by design.