Last week’s inauguration of a border crossing between Eilat and Aqaba will provide a big boost to Israeli tourism, according to local travel experts.
The crossing — which is open to everyone but Israelis and Jordanians at this point — is enabling tourists visiting Israel to cross into Jordan, and vice versa.
Officials here predict that Israelis will be allowed to visit Jordan as soon as a peace treaty is signed, perhaps within months.
The fact that Jordan has finally agreed to admit tourists with Israeli stamps in their passports will be a real boon to tourism for both countries, say travel agents.
Officially, the regulations regarding the Aqaba-Eilat crossing do not apply to the Allenby Bridge, since the Jordanians regard the Israeli side of the bridge as occupied territory, according to a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Tourism.
However, according to Jordanian officials, they are unofficially admitting most — but not all — tourists with Israeli stamps over the bridge.
Mark Khano, the co-owner of an eastern Jerusalem travel agency that specializes in travel between Israel and Jordan, says that Jordan’s past policy of excluding Israeli stamp holders was bad for the Jordanian travel industry.
“I don’t have any firm statistics, but something like 20,000 Westerners visited Jordan via Israel last year. That’s a very small number, when you consider that Jordan had 600,000 tourists last year,” he said.
Khano attributed the low figure to “the complications of needing a visa in advance, and the fact that Jordan didn’t admit people with Israeli stamps.”
Now that Jordan has reversed this policy and is openly welcoming tourism with Israel, Israeli travel agents are eager to promote travel to Jordan, as well as package deals that include Israel and Jordan.
CAPITALIZING ON WARMING RELATIONS
Toward that end, Israel recently hosted the first-ever International Mediterranean Peace Tourism Conference.
The conference, which attracted travel professionals from a dozen countries, focused on the advantages of package deals allowing tourists to visit more than one country in the region.
One of the participants, Mahmoud Abdul Wahab, public relations coordinator for the Egyptian Tourist Ministry, stressed, “If we all work together, tourists from the U.S. and Europe will come to visit Egypt and then travel to Israel, and perhaps Turkey. “Once they travel all this way, tourists want to see as much as they can,” he said.
Wahab conceded that terrorist attacks aimed at tourists visiting Egypt have hurt tourism. But he said that “once the region is perceived as safe, tourists will flock here.”
Capitalizing on the good will created by warming relations between Israel and Jordan, one of Israel’s largest travel agencies last week ran a newspaper advertisement stating: “1979, the road to Egypt; 1994, the road to Jordan; 1995, the road to . . .” On the other hand, many other agencies have decided not to advertise — because they do not have to. “Several dozen people have called us already, both tourists and those with dual passports,” said Jerusalem travel agent Mark Feldman.
“There’s been a lot of optimism, a lot of interest, even more than there was for Egypt in the beginning,” he said. “People seem to have no fear about traveling to Jordan. In Egypt there is the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist elements. This isn’t the perception we have of Jordan.”
Though he foresees no problem attracting tourists to Jordan, Feldman is concerned about what they will find when they get there.
“They don’t have enough facilities, enough hotels. I’m not sure whether they will be able to cope if we send three or four busloads of tourists a day,” he said.
But Khalil Adwan, a Jordanian travel agent, counters that “Jordan can definitely handle more tourists.”
But, he concedes, “we can’t handle mass tourism just yet.”
Speaking from Amman on the newly established phone link between Jordan and Israel, Adwan said he was “very optimistic” about the potential for tourism between the two countries.
“We have been preparing for this day for some time, and three new major hotels are planned for Amman. We are looking for quality tourism,” he said.
“Once the border is open to Israelis,” he predicted, “we will need even more hotel rooms.”
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