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Jordanian tourism through the eyes of Petra Tours

As archaeologists point out civilizations are marked in different layers the further people dig down the earth. In fact many argue the cradle concept is so alive amongst us down to only a few meters to unearth the Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Islamic civilizations that once walked the land of Jordan.

It is because of such terrain that Nasser Kawar, decided to leave his insurance business and set up Petra Tours in downtown Amman in 1965. “I wanted to sell Jordan to the world, to make sure everyone knows, Jordan is our cradle of civilization.”

And so his company, only part of five or six tour operators at the time in Amman, started offering tour packages to the European and American markets, posing Jordan and Palestine as a great part of the cradle of civilization and the land of prophets.

Tourism at the time was beginning to develop with the government in Jordan actively taking a decision back in the early 1960s to market Jordan as a rich destination for international visitors. Statistics provided in the 1967 Jordan Yearbook by the Ministry of Culture and Information, showed the number of visitors coming to the region increased from 31,000 in 1951 to 616,831 in 1966.

“I established Petra Tours after much thought about the many touristic places in Jordan and the holy places of Palestine since we were regarded as one country,” says Kawar, who had also set up a branch of Petra Tours in Jerusalem.

Awni Kawar, presently general manager of the Group and the eldest son, remembers that time well. “Between 1965 till 1967, we catered for religious tourists, as plenty of visitors from Europe and the United States wanted to see the holy places especially of the city of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and would come through cruise liners that would dock in the Haifa port and the Qalandia Airport.”

It was a lively period as the 1967 Jordan Yearbook shows the number of visitors that came to the country from the United States stood at 56,000 in 1966, 22,000 from Britain, 15,852 from Germany and 20,000 from France. “On the ground as well as we were seeing tourists coming and going with our office in Jerusalem taking care of them and arranging their tours, crossing also the King Hussein bridge into Jordan and going back after their sightseeing,” remembers Nasser Kawar.

It was a dynamic period that came to an end after the 1967 June War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “Strict security procedures that were imposed meant we were no longer able to operate our office effectively, and thus it had to be closed down.”

From the early 1970s the concentration become on selling Jordan as a “stand-alone destination” but in many ways it was a continuation of a previous era with the Kingdom becoming a center for religious, cultural, and historical tourism.

“Despite the seemingly never-ending political problems, more and more travel and tourism operators realized in the early 1970s Jordan was itself a great tourism destination with Petra, Jeresh, Madaba and Amman with its Roman Theater and its great citadel, all of whom exhibit the cradle of civilization concept,” adds Nasser Kawar.

In many ways Jordan as the place for inter-faith dialogue, in the Amman Citadel for instance, and among the ruins, a mosque continues to stand besides a church serving as a symbol of Muslim, Christian existence.
Tourism grew especially after the 1973 oil price rise when it started to change the economic geography of the region, when people started moving for work and greater remittances and revenues began to be distributed across the countries of the region.

“One story I will always remember is the day when Neil Armstrong, the famous astronaut visited Jordan in the early 1970s. He came as part of a large group of visitors, about 500, and I remember, my father and staff scurrying trying to find them hotels in downtown Amman,” says Awni Kawar.

Apart from the old Philadelphia Hotel and Intercontinental Hotel, the few first class hotels in Amman, Petra Tours employees, numbering four, had to book guests in the one- and two-star hotels that continue to exist in the downtown today.

These hotels, modest and basic, some of them built in the 1920s and 1930s, have seen glorious days when dignitaries and even royalties visiting Amman would stay in them. Today, still standing as cheap-priced hotels, they continue to serve as affordable accommodation for the so-called bag-back travelers who frequently come to Jordan as part of their travels in the region.

“The visit of Armstrong was a great event and a good public relations exercise for tourism in Jordan with the idea being that if he came many others especially from America and Europe would follow suit and resume their visits to Jordan,” continues Awni Kawar who has a degree in civil engineering. But although a visit such as this was important, people like Nasser Kawar had been traveling all their lives. “In our business, much traveling around the world is required, we can’t sit in the office and expect tourists to fall in our laps, we have to get out around the world and induce visitors to Jordan,” he says.

Nasser Kawar traveled all over not only in search of customers, ordinary visitors and/or corporate clients but to acquire knowledge of the different places and cultures. “I needed to travel to understand first-hand what people where looking for, the kind of holidays they are interested in and the services they expected and what we in Jordan can provide for them”.

Although today Petra Tours has become the General Sales Agent for many international airlines, including Cyprus Airways, China Airlines, Romanian Air Transport, Adria Airways, Tap Portugal, Federal Express and the latest Bahrain Air, his first deal was with Austrian Airlines.

The relationship continued since 1966 and was cemented through the first Austrian tourist group his company received to Jordan and since then has been increasingly steadily. The European and American component maintained an upward stride in the 1970s, if the Neil Armstrong and his entourage visit to Amman can be taken as a new stage.

Although, the Arab percentage of tourists to Jordan stood at around 72 percent between 1975 and 1985, the figure stood at 13.2 percent for American and European tourists coming additionally from newer places as the Scandinavian countries, former East European countries especially Poland as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, China, and Japan.

Such also required new innovations on the part of tour operators and travel agents like Petra Tours that began to provide different tour packages for travelers coming to the Kingdom. Although the religious tourist aspect continued to be important, the idea of cultural/historical tourism was gaining greater ground.

Through international marketing campaigns which, quite often tour operators like Petra Tours continued to carry out through such men as Nasser Kawar, Jordan begun to be sold to international operators as a country with heritage and history through the relics and archaeology of places as Jeresh, Umm Qais, and Petra, mosaics of Madaba and Crusader Castles like the one in Kerek, and of course the famous Dead Sea.

The idea was beginning to be put forward Jordan was indeed at the crossroads of civilization having strong elements of westernization as in the Greek and Roman culture and combining it with Middle East orientalism, espousing a cultural fusion that is unique in world societies.

This was very important for the kind of tourists who were coming to the Kingdom looking for something special rather than what they were used to in Europe and United States, or other places like Canada and Australia. The elements of religious tourism were becoming slowly combined with historical, religious, cultural forms of tourism. In fact the religious tourists, the ones that came to see the place were Prophet Mosses were supposed to have stood to view the Holy lands in Mount Nebo, came to be also viewed as culture, archaeology, nature or just plain sightseeing tourists.

“During this time as well, and as a result, Petra Tours started to specialize and provide packages for different tourists, we were, and are still quite flexible in our approach and offer whatever our clients want by offering customized tours,” Awni Kawar says who joined the family business in the early 1980s. Of course in the 1990s, such packages began to be offered as tours for businessmen or corporate clients who were increasingly coming to the Kingdom to attend different conferences. In fact this business was becoming so big and lucrative that in 2002 a special division was set up in Petra Tours to cater for this kind of tourism to the Kingdom.

Its head Mazen Kawar, second son of Nasser Kawar and a managing partner says: “Petra Events Management shows the extent of the development of the tourism sector in Jordan, and its different forms of specializations that is an added source of strength because now business and pleasure are combined for the benefit of the country.”

Top clients today want to hold their events, meetings, conferences and exhibitions in Jordan and this means a lot of business in terms of getting the economy moving. This trend in business tourism began to grow from the mid-1980s onwards when international companies, world organizations and NGOs began to look for different places around the world to hold their events.

“Through out the 1980s and 1990s Jordan began to gain greater reputation for its conferences, meetings and hotels which is bearing fruit today through the many international conferences annually held in different parts of the Kingdom, whether in the Dead Sea where we have a large convention center, in Amman and in Aqaba,” adds Mazen Kawar.

Today some of the big international names stage their conferences and events through Petra Tours including the World Economic Forum, Project Rebuild Iraq and SOFEX as well as many others whose delegates go on pre- and post-tours around the country during their businesses in Jordan.

Petra Tours have also become involved in the outbound business. Through their Petra World Travel, under Wael Kawar, the third son of Nasser Kawar, it specializes in sending travelers, whether Jordanian and Arab visitors from the region to different parts of the globe.

“A lot of businesses is made out of young Jordanian honeymooners who want to have that special holiday of a life-time, and we at Petra World Holidays seek to oblige,” he says.

The social change aspect of travel has diversified in the 1990s and today. “More and more honeymooners, upwardly mobile and others began to have their honeymoons in capitals across the Arab world, in say Cairo, Sharm Al Sheikh, Tunis and in countries where they had relatives in, to Europe, and today they are widening their destinations to Malaysia and south-east Asia, points out Wael Kawar.

Today’s Petra Tours high tower in Shmeisani is a far cry from its early years. However these years are fondly remembered as they are replicated in the Royal Automobile Museum of a small 1960s street with a booth signifying where Petra Tours started.

In many ways such is the representation of the modern history of tourism in Jordan which continues in an upward mode of development and bringing East and West together.