AMMAN — Hoping for customers, Ahmad Nassar is
dusting and polishing the trinkets and souvenirs in his tourist shop in Madaba,
an ancient town in central Jordan known for its early Christian mosaics.
اضافة اعلان
The COVID-19 pandemic injured Jordan's tourism industry and
its economy as a whole, which suffered its worst contraction in decades last
year.
"I felt despair, there was no income, no work, there
was no support for shop owners," Nassar said.
Now foreign tourists are starting to trickle back, and the
situation is looking more hopeful, he said.
The
European Union last week included Jordan among a dozen
new epidemiologically safe countries as of July 1, and government efforts to revive
the tourism sector appear to be paying off.
Officials this month announced special measures for Jordan's
“golden triangle,” which includes famous sites such as the ancient city of
Petra, Wadi Rum and crusader castles, closing the area off to all but the fully
vaccinated.
At the start of July, the government also lifted most
lockdown measures after a sharp drop in infections, reopening gyms and pools.
"At the height of the crisis, hotel occupancy did not
exceed 2% or 3%," Abdul Hakeem Al-Hindi, the head of Jordan Hotels
Association, told Reuters.
Now occupancy rates in some of Jordan's main tourist centers
are back up to 40-50% in the Dead Sea and the Red Sea port city of Aqaba and
around 30% in Amman, the latter driven by returning tourists from the Gulf,
latest hotel industry figures show.
The government is also taking other steps to get the number
of foreign tourists back to the record 3 million visitors Jordan received in
2019, many of whom arrived on low-cost European carriers led by Ryanair which
resumed flights last month.
It includes subsidizing charter flights with around $60 for
every passenger if they stay in Jordan for a week, said Abdul Razzaq Arabiyat,
director of the Jordan Tourism Board.
He expected the Russian market to grow the fastest in the
coming months.
But Hindi said a revival would take time.
"We need at least two years to return to what we were,”
he said.
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