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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

EgyptAir erases Israel from its website

From YNet:
Egypt Air, the largest airline in Egypt, has removed Israel from the map – literally. On its website, Ynet has learned, Jordan's land reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

The airline's subsidiary, Air Sinai, flies to Israel regularly, but customers seeking flights to Ben Gurion National Airport will have a hard time finding them. On the map are the names of the Mideast capitals – Amman, Beirut, and Damascus – but Israel is nowhere to be found.

The omission is especially odd seeing as the company continues to fly to Israel four times a week. Cairo-Tel Aviv flights were temporarily halted following the recent uprising that overturned the government, but were then reinstated.
YNet is not quite right. The map does show Israel (weird boundaries, but it is there, between Jordan and the sea):

The problem is that EgyptAir erased Israel from its entire website.

In other words, even though EgyptAir flies from Cairo to Tel Aviv four times a week, it is impossible to book a flight:


You literally cannot input "Tel Aviv" or "Israel" in any fields to book a flight.

I could not see how to book a flight via EgyptAir from Cairo to Tel Aviv on Expedia or Orbitz either. So if YNet is correct and there are still flights, I have no idea how to find them. (All I could find are stopovers in Turkey or Jordan. El Al has direct flights that for some reason were not visible in my search on those travel sites either.)