For the better part of two and a half years, El Al Israel Airlines wore the mantle of hero. When every other major international carrier quietly slipped out of Ben Gurion Airport’s skies following the October 7th massacre, El Al stayed. So did Israel’s three other domestic carriers: Air Haifa, Arkia, and Israir. But it was El Al, by far the largest of the four, that became the primary lifeline. It flew. It filled planes. It charged a premium, and travelers paid without complaint, because El Al was the dominant game in town and the one passengers counted on most to get them home.

That goodwill, earned flight by flight and shekel by shekel over more than two years of wartime operations, has been squandered with breathtaking speed since hostilities with Iran resumed on February 28th, 2026. What was once a lifeline has become a source of chaos, confusion, and heartbreak for thousands of travelers left stranded, ignored, and screaming in the terminal halls of Ben Gurion Airport. This is the story of how El Al dropped the ball at the worst possible moment and why it matters far beyond the inconvenience of missed flights.

From Lifeline to Liability

It would be unfair not to acknowledge El Al’s track record since October 7, 2023. While United, Delta, American, Air Canada, and virtually every other international carrier suspended service, Israel’s four domestic airlines kept flying. El Al bore the greatest share of that responsibility and, to its credit, largely met it. The airline was widely regarded as the most dependable of the four. For all its well-documented flaws in customer service and IT infrastructure, El Al performed when it had to get planes in the air.

That makes what has happened since February 28th all the more damning. El Al was, in theory, uniquely positioned to manage this crisis. It had the experience, the infrastructure, the customer base, and the trust. And yet, during this crisis, it was Air Haifa, operating a modest fleet of 72-seat prop planes, that emerged as the carrier travelers could actually count on. When the largest Israeli airline was unreachable, and its flights were evaporating, the smallest one was quietly getting people out. That comparison should sting. Instead, what travelers encountered was an airline that could not answer its phones, whose WhatsApp support system was effectively useless, and whose operational decisions left thousands of passengers in terminal limbo.

At the heart of El Al’s communication failure is one misguided decision: routing all customer service through WhatsApp. In normal times, that is an annoyance. In a war-driven travel crisis with thousands of stranded passengers desperately seeking rebooking, it is a catastrophe. Passengers report waiting hours, sometimes overnight, for an agent to respond, only for that agent to disconnect before resolving anything. In multiple documented cases, El Al reached out via WhatsApp to offer an alternative flight; passengers replied promptly, only to be told by email that they had not responded.

Travelers without smartphones or WhatsApp were left completely in the dark. No phone line. No functioning web portal. No alternative. For elderly passengers and those with accessibility needs, El Al ceased to exist as a customer service entity. The airline never disclosed that, when passengers purchased their tickets, they would need a smartphone with WhatsApp to rebook in a crisis. That is not a minor oversight. It is a fundamental failure of the duty of care that an airline owes its customers.

The scenes at Ben Gurion Airport have been shocking. Shouting. Shoving. Screaming at counters. Passengers who had been assigned to flights found themselves unceremoniously removed with no explanation and no rebooking. One of the most infuriating episodes unfolded when El Al cancelled its Newark flight and rerouted those passengers onto the Miami flight, which already had a fully booked load assigned and waiting. Israel’s Transportation Ministry compounded the misery by approving El Al to carry 200 passengers per flight, then abruptly cutting the limit to 100, stranding scores of passengers who had already been assigned seats. Regulators failed travelers here, too, but the airline’s own failures cannot be excused by pointing upward.

The IT Problem That Never Got Fixed

Anyone who has flown El Al more than a handful of times knows the airline’s IT systems, or rather, the absence of them. Selecting a special meal, choosing a seat, managing a booking online: tasks trivial on any other carrier become exercises in frustration on El Al’s platforms. During this crisis, El Al’s digital infrastructure collapsed entirely. The Manage My Booking function that the airline directed passengers to use was not working. The app was broken. Passengers trying to view seat assignments were caught in a catch-22: accepting a seat assignment locked them into a booking, making them ineligible for a refund. El Al has collected premium fares from a captive market for over two years. Where that revenue went, and why none of it went into functional IT and adequate staffing, deserves a serious answer.

Behind the statistics are real people in genuinely frightening situations. Families sheltering from missile attacks in hotel bomb shelters, desperately trying to get home to jobs and children’s schools. Elderly travelers. People with medical conditions for whom extended stays are dangerous. But the human cost does not belong only to tourists. There is another group whose suffering is particularly galling: Israelis living and working abroad.

Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens maintain careers that require regular international travel. For many, El Al is not simply a preference. It is a point of national loyalty and practical necessity. These are frequent flyers who log enormous mileage year after year, paying prices that would make any American or European carrier blush, out of loyalty and a genuine belief their airline will be there when it matters. During this crisis, that belief has been shattered. These are people with jobs to return to, contracts to fulfill, and in some cases visas and work permits with strict reporting requirements. Being stranded is not an inconvenience for them. It can have serious professional and legal consequences.

And what do these loyal, premium-paying passengers get in return? The Matmid frequent flyer program is among the most demanding and least rewarding in the industry. Earning meaningful status requires far more flying than it does in equivalent programs at United, Delta, or American. Redeeming miles is an exercise in frustration, with availability that borders on nonexistent and blackout periods that seem designed to discourage redemption. Those who grind their way to Top Platinum status are promised a dedicated service desk, a direct line, a real person, and priority handling. During this crisis, that desk has gone completely dark. Calls unanswered. Callbacks that never come. The passengers who gave El Al the most have been abandoned just as completely as everyone else. They were explicitly promised something better. They have learned the hard way that the promise was hollow.

The Travel Agent Blame Game

One failure stands out for its particular cynicism: El Al’s habit of blaming travel agents for problems the airline itself created. Here is how the shell game works. A passenger books through a travel agent, a perfectly normal transaction. When a flight is cancelled, El Al quietly seizes control of the ticket. The agent suddenly finds they can do nothing: they cannot rebook, modify, or access the reservation. El Al has locked them out. Then, when the stranded passenger contacts El Al directly, they are told to contact their travel agent. The agent with no power. The agent with no information. The agent who has been calling El Al for days and cannot get through.

The passenger is caught in an intentional no-man ’s-land. El Al points to the agent. The agent points back. Neither can act. A transparent airline would either empower agents with the tools to rebook on its behalf or take full ownership of the rebooking process itself. El Al does neither. It seizes control and disclaims responsibility for exercising it. Travel agents who specialize in Israel travel described this past week as professionally unlike anything they had experienced, not because crises are new, but because they had never felt so completely without tools, information, or anyone at the airline empowered to help.

We Learned Our Lesson. Or So They Said.

This is not the first time. The June 2025 war produced the same hallmarks: canceled flights, unreachable customer service, and agents locked out of bookings. Afterward, El Al held calls with travel agents, acknowledged the failures, and assured the industry that lessons had been learned and that things would be different next time. Next time is now. And it is worse. Not marginally. Significantly, measurably, and undeniably worse across every dimension agents and passengers experienced in June.

El Al’s management should be required to publicly answer: what, specifically, was done between June 2025 and February 2026 to improve crisis operations? Were staff hired and trained? Were systems stress tested? Were agent access protocols upgraded? If yes, the evidence is invisible. If not, those post-June calls were not a commitment to improvement. They were damage control theater. The traveling public has a long memory. The agents on those calls remember. The passengers stranded in both crises remember. Two consecutive failures with the same playbook and a round of reassuring calls in between is not bad luck. It is a management choice.

A National Carrier in Name Only

El Al calls itself Israel’s national carrier. But is it? El Al was privatized. The Israeli government does not own or operate it. It is a privately held company whose primary obligation, like any private company, is to its bottom line. There is no law, charter, or government mandate designating El Al as Israel’s official national carrier. The airline gave itself that title, leans on it aggressively and profitably, and accepts none of the accountability that genuine national carrier status would demand.

El Al has spent years enjoying the best of both worlds. When it suits the airline, it invokes national carrier status to command loyalty and premium pricing. When accountability is demanded, it retreats behind the logic of a private business in difficult conditions. It cannot have it both ways. Either accept the full obligation of being Israel’s de facto flag carrier, including functioning when the country needs it most, or stop trading on that identity to fill seats at premium prices. The customer service failures on display are not a wartime anomaly. They are a chronic condition. Passengers have complained for years about unreachable phone lines, IT systems that belong in a different decade, and an institutional attitude that treats the customer as a necessary inconvenience. Other airlines serving far more passengers across far more complex route networks manage to answer their phones and run working websites. This is not an impossible standard. It is the baseline. Israel has built world-class institutions in medicine, technology, intelligence, and defense under permanent adversity. The idea that its self-proclaimed national airline cannot staff a functional customer service operation is not just a business failure. It is an embarrassment.

El Al did not fail its passengers because of the war. It failed because it was not prepared, not staffed, not communicating, and not functioning as a serious airline when it mattered most. And it failed in exactly the same ways it failed before, despite promising otherwise. The tourists still waiting for seats, the families who sheltered in bomb shelters, wondering when they would get home, the loyal frequent flyers who earned Top Platinum status only to be abandoned, and the travel agents whose phones burned for a week without a single answer all deserved better. They paid for better. El Al owes them not just an explanation and, where applicable, a refund, but a genuine, verifiable, public commitment that this will not happen a third time.

With prayers for the safety of everyone still in Israel, and for a true and lasting peace.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)