Suspended Geographies. What Happens to Countries Excluded from Travel Catalogues for Years

A war beyond the border, an epidemic thousands of kilometres away, a region suddenly associated with instability: some destinations begin to disappear from the geography of travel even though hotels, monuments and landscapes have not ceased to exist. Between real risk and perceived risk, a middle ground opens up in which tourism can remain suspended for months or years.

In Petra, the Siq continues to narrow between sandstone walls until, through a fissure, the façade of the Treasury suddenly appears. In Wadi Rum, the desert retains its ability to change colour with the light, shifting from ochre to red as the shadows of the mountains lengthen across the sand. The hotels of Wadi Musa open their doors, guides know every passage through the archaeological site, drivers continue to travel the roads connecting Amman with the south of the country.

And yet a destination can remain in exactly the same place and move enormously far away in the minds of travellers.

This is what happened to Jordan after the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023. At that stage, the conflict was not being fought in Petra, Amman or Wadi Rum, but Jordanian tourism quickly suffered the consequences. According to the World Bank, between October 2023 and August 2024 tourist arrivals declined at an annual rate of 6.6%, with a particularly significant contraction in European visitors.

Petra had not suddenly become a different place. What had changed was the context in which it was imagined. For part of the international public, Israel, Gaza, Jordan and, more generally, the Middle East had begun to overlap within the same emotional geography. Distance measured in kilometres mattered less than the perceived proximity to war.

The phenomenon is particularly evident in regions we know less well. “Middle East”, “Africa”, “Caucasus”, “Sahel” easily become large mental containers within which a localised event can alter the perception of very different countries.

Tourism is particularly sensitive to this mechanism because it depends on trust and anticipation. Even before departure, we imagine the place we are going to visit, and when that imagination becomes occupied by war, terrorism, epidemics or instability, the commercial process can change rapidly.

The client calls the agency to ask whether it is advisable to travel. The agent asks the tour operator for clarification. A departure becomes more difficult to fill, some programmes are reduced, carriers may alter capacity and frequencies, while destinations perceived as easier to propose gradually occupy the space left vacant.

A country can therefore disappear from a catalogue without anyone formally deciding to “ban” it. It is more accurate to speak of suspended, reduced or temporarily removed destinations: a succession of cautious and commercial decisions which, when combined, produces a new geography of travel.

Jordan knows this condition well. Its position, between Syria, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, has repeatedly forced the tourism sector to confront crises that developed beyond its own borders. Research published in the Journal of Destination Marketing & Management had already examined, before the Gaza war, how the perceived safety of surrounding countries could influence Jordan’s tourism image in the US market.

A crisis has precise coordinates. The perception of risk, by contrast, tends to spread through association.

An even clearer precedent came in 2014 with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone were the countries most affected, while fear of infection began to influence travel towards other parts of the continent.

The World Bank used the expression aversion behavior to describe behaviours generated both by rational assessments and by disproportionate fears. The case of Gambia was emblematic: although it had recorded no cases of Ebola, the country reported cancellations amounting to 65% of hotel bookings and 50% of inbound flights.

The mental category “Africa” had ended up prevailing over real distances. Destinations far from the epicentre of the crisis were drawn into the same perception, while the World Health Organization stated that it did not recommend generalised bans on international travel and trade.

An enormous and complex geography had been compressed into a single image.

The same principle can operate in a less dramatic way during a geopolitical crisis. The impact, however, is not identical for every country. The World Bank observed that, after October 2023, non-Gulf Middle Eastern economies closer to the conflict suffered more heavily from the effects on tourism mobility, while other areas of the region continued to grow.

This difference matters. Fear does not follow a mathematical formula: the strength of the destination, the composition of its markets, air connectivity, the type of tourism and the ability to maintain an autonomous narrative all play a role.

In this scenario, official travel advisories play an essential role for travellers and, above all, for those who build and sell travel. The fundamental point is to read them in their actual geographical and temporal detail.

The case of Rwanda shows well how a short headline can tell less than the full document. As of 10 September 2026, the British Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office advises against non-essential travel to parts of Rusizi District located within ten kilometres of the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including Rwanda’s islands in Lake Kivu and Kamembe Airport.

The US Department of State, in its official assessment of 4 June 2026, instead assigns Rwanda overall Level 3, Reconsider Travel, citing risks related to health, crime and unrest, while separately advising against travel within ten kilometres of the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Two institutional sources may therefore represent the same geography differently because they respond to their own criteria and responsibilities. For the travel trade, this means that an advisory must be read in full, dated, updated and contextualised. Prudence requires precision: distinguishing an entire nation from a region, and a region from a border strip, can radically change the meaning of the information.

When a destination remains on the margins of major flows, a small number of travellers continue to choose it after carefully verifying the actual conditions in the country. These are people who do not stop at the general perception or a headline read in passing, but compare official advisories, consult the Farnesina website, check the guidance issued by the authorities of the destination country and distinguish between areas that are genuinely discouraged and the rest of the territory. This exercise in geographical precision can sometimes reveal how wide the gap between actual risk and perceived risk may be, and how much of the barrier to travel now lies in the image constructed around the destination.

When conditions make travel possible, these travellers may encounter the country in an unusual situation. Hotels with greater availability, guides able to devote more time, archaeological sites with few visitors, less crowded restaurants and a more direct relationship with those who live and work in the territory can give the experience a quality that is difficult to find during periods of full demand. Prices, in certain seasons and for some services, may also be more favourable precisely because international demand has declined.

Petra without long queues, a guide able to dwell on details instead of chasing the pace of a large group, a camp in Wadi Rum where hospitality is not compressed by a constant turnover of arrivals: these are particular conditions, often born from a difficult season for those working in tourism, but capable of creating a much more personal relationship with the destination for those who travel.

Convenience, of course, must never replace a serious and up-to-date safety assessment. But when official advisories, read in full and compared with one another, present a situation more nuanced than the one embedded in the collective imagination, travel can also become an exercise in distinguishing between real geography and the geography of fear.

The bold have their treasure when courage coincides with information: not only more favourable conditions, but the rare privilege of encountering a place at a moment when it has more time to devote to those who arrive.

The deepest dimension of suspended geographies emerges when we stop considering destinations as collections of attractions and look at the people who live around them.

When Petra loses visitors, the Treasury continues to exist. What suffers is the human economy built around travel.

A room remains empty, and with it a minibus does not depart, a guide remains without work, a purchase is never made. The restaurant prepares fewer covers, the shop sells less, the artisan meets fewer customers and the DMC sees the sequence of departures on which months of activity had been built begin to thin out.

The cancellation of an apparently individual journey continues to ripple outward. A day without a group becomes a day without work for many people; a weak season means less investment, less maintenance, fewer opportunities to retain qualified staff.

If the suspension lasts a few months, a tourism system can endure. When it lasts for years, it begins to change. Experienced guides look for other jobs, small operators close, connections and services are reduced because demand no longer supports them. At that point, the perception that initially drove the market away begins to physically reshape the destination itself.

This is the bitterest paradox of suspended geographies: a place can be penalised by the belief that it is no longer possible to visit it to the point of losing part of the infrastructure that once made it possible to visit it well.

For a tour operator, suspending a destination can be relatively quick. Reintroducing it permanently into programming, by contrast, means rebuilding a system.

Connections must be checked, relationships with hotels, guides and DMCs re-established, itineraries and contracts updated, insurance coverage and operating conditions reassessed. But above all, desire must be restored to the client.

After years in which the name of a country has appeared alongside the words “war”, “crisis” or “instability”, simply declaring that the destination is accessible again is unlikely to be enough. Continually repeating only that a country is safe may even risk keeping it imprisoned within the crisis from which it is trying to distance itself.

What is needed is an autonomous narrative.

Jordan must once again be allowed to mean Petra and Wadi Rum, Jerash, the Dead Sea, trekking, archaeology, desert, hospitality. The story must once again generate curiosity instead of merely responding to fear.

Here, media, tourism boards, airlines, DMCs, agencies and tour operators share a delicate responsibility. They must report risk when it exists without amplifying it beyond its real dimension, update information when conditions change and help travellers distinguish what is happening inside a destination from what is happening around it.

In Petra, meanwhile, the stone continues to change colour throughout the day, guides continue to know the history of the Nabataeans and the desert extends beyond the mountains. The place remains, even during the years in which the international market stops looking at it.

A country should be assessed according to what is actually happening, at that moment, within its borders and in the specific areas concerned. Geographical proximity to a crisis deserves attention, but should not automatically become identity.

Countries can disappear for years from the maps of tourism, but the most difficult border to reopen is the one that has slowly formed in the minds of those who stopped considering them a possible destination.