AMMAN — Occupancy rates at Amman, Dead Sea, Aqaba, and Petra
hotels during last week were excellent, according to the chairman of the Jordan
Hotels Association, Abdel Hakim Al-Hindi.
اضافة اعلان
Aqaba hotels had an occupancy rate of about
75 percent in the course of the week, while over the weekend it rose to 95
percent, he said, adding that occupancy rates at Dead Sea hotels reached 60
percent during the week and 95 percent at weekend, while in Petra the occupancy
rate over a week reached 70 percent, and in Amman 65 percent.
Hindi said that the recent easing of
measures “contributed to the improvement of tourism in Jordan, and it is
expected that tourism will be vigorous in the coming months”.
Chairman of
Petra Development Tourism Regional Authority Sulaiman Al-Farajat told
Jordan News that the ancient city
of Petra “recorded last March the highest number of visitors since the
beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020”.
He said that “more than 53,896 visitors of
all nationalities visited Petra last March, including 43,533 foreigners and
3,859 Arabs (other than Jordanians), while the number of Jordanian visitors
reached about 6,504.”
The number of visitors increased by 292
percent in March over February, he said, adding that March “recorded 21,557
visitors of all nationalities, including 14,898 foreign visitors, 1,836 Arab
visitors, and 4,652 Jordanians”.
According to Farajat, last March only 4,656
people visited Petra, “the majority of whom were Jordanians and Arabs”, while
in the same month of 2019 “it received approximately 74,413 visitors of various
nationalities, including 68,087 foreign and 6,326 Arab and Jordanian visitors”,
he said.
He reiterated that there has been a
remarkable increase in the number of visitors, especially after the government
eased the procedures required of those visiting the Kingdom at the beginning of
last March, “a decision that reflected positively on the tourist movement in
the city of Petra and thus on the commercial and economic activity in the
region”.
Indicators point to further improvement in
the number of visitors to Petra during the coming period, “which calls on the
authorities to continue to further improve the infrastructure and transport,
and implement new projects, linking the downtown area with the visitor center and
the tourist street, and to encourage investment in Petra,” said Farajat.
He added that the
Petra authority works to provide new products to enrich the experience of tourists
and induce them to prolong their stay in the city; for example, “it recently
launched the flying taxi service as a start to provide new and unique projects
in the region, in a manner befitting the global position of the city”.
Mahmood Al-Awadi, who owns a travel agency,
told
Jordan News that the indicators “bode well”, and that a revival of tourism
in Jordan can be expected.
He attributed the low numbers of tourists to
the Kingdom to the COVID-19 pandemic, which “affected those who work in the
sector”.
Awadi said that “just as we felt that the
tourism movement in Jordan was picking up, the pandemic hit, and ruined
everything”.
“However, I believe that it is the right
time now to stand on our feet again and take serious actions to revive the
sector. I believe that the pandemic is almost finished and that people have
begun to travel again, and we must take advantage of that,” he said.
The government, he said, should support the tourism
sector, “especially that it helps reviving the economy, too”.
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