Wildfires, Flooding, Upheavals: Travel in 2023

It was a year that was to mark the post-pandemic recovery of travel, bringing economic relief to local communities that had been hit hard by the prolonged loss of tourism revenue. Borders fully reopened, pandemic restrictions were lifted and traveler bookings surged, sparking a social media trend called “revenge travel.” But even as demand in 2023 reached near 2019 levels — with an estimated 975 million tourists traveling internationally between January and September, according to the World Tourism Organization — a series of disasters, upheavals and unparalleled weather events devastated destinations across the globe.

Flooding. Wildfires. Heat waves. Blizzards. In the United States alone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designated 23 separate weather disasters, the largest number of billion-dollar disasters ever recorded. The year also brought prolonged labor strikes, technology glitches, civil unrest and a record number of complaints lodged against U.S. airlines.

This year “took chaos to a new level,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for Atmosphere Research. “It seems that the world is on fire and the travel industry and travelers are affected by all of these disruptions everywhere.”

“The take-home lesson is you can’t just book a trip and forget about it until you are ready to go,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “You have to be an informed traveler.”

Here are some of the year’s most disruptive and devastating events for travelers and local residents.

January

Technological trouble — at least in the United States — seemed to seep over from 2022 into the new year. Just weeks after Southwest Airlines upended holiday vacations for as many as 2 million passengers by canceling thousands of flights in late December 2022, another air travel meltdown struck in early January. This time, a technology system failure at the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded domestic departures nationwide, causing thousands of flights across major airlines to be delayed or canceled. The trouble highlighted the fragile airspace system and renewed calls for greater funding for the F.A.A.

The breadth of the outage shocked some passengers traveling that day. Jaime Vallejo was flying from Newark to Ecuador with his wife and three children when he learned that his flight was delayed because of the F.A.A. outage. “That’s the computer system for the whole country, and that’s something that should make you a little…