Jordan needs promotion to attract visitors

The Kingdom needs to do more to promote itself abroad as a tourist destination, foreign tour operators interviewed said on Tuesday. Gabray Ye, an outbound tour operator from Shanghai, said there was hardly any news about tourism in Jordan in the Chinese media. “Jordan tourism bodies should work on promoting the country as a tourism destination in China, as annually some five million Chinese tourists come to the Middle East,” Ye told The Jordan Times on the sidelines of the International Conference on Seizing Tourism Market Opportunities in Times of Rapid Change, which opened on Tuesday at the Dead Sea. He added that the main destinations for Chinese tourists in the region include Dubai, Turkey and Egypt. A direct flight from Shanghai to Amman might encourage more tourism, he suggested. On the other hand, Benjamin Dufy, a tour operator from France, explained that Jordan is well known as a destination for French tourists, but they are afraid to come due to the regional turmoil. “We deliver the message that Jordan is safe, but people have mixed information about the Middle East,” he said. “Before, we used to have joint packages for Jordan and Syria. Now, things have changed and tourists cannot go to Syria and they refuse to come to Jordan alone because it is expensive to come to one destination.” In Ukraine, tourists find Jordan a more expensive destination than other countries of the region such as Egypt, according to Alexander Kolykhan, a Ukrainian tour operator. “As tour operators, we explain to them that service here is better, thus it is more expensive, but they want to pay less,” he explained, adding that representatives of the tourism sector in Jordan need to work more to promote the country in Ukraine. Responding to these remarks, Jordan Tourism Board (JTB) Managing Director Abdul Razaq Arabiyat said promotion campaigns would be intensified in several countries, with a focus on the Chinese market. “We will participate in an exhibition in China, meet tour operators there and invite a number of Chinese journalists to write about the Kingdom,” Arabiyat told The Jordan Times. In addition, he said, the JTB will support any campaign run by the Jordanian private sector that seeks to promote the country as a tourism destination. “We will finance 50 per cent of the cost of these campaigns.” Arabiyat added that promotional campaigns are being devised for other Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia. By The Jordan Times