Petra visitors expected to reach half a million by end of May

AMMAN — A total of 471,037 tourists visited the ancient city of Petra during the January-April period of 2023, according to data issued by the Petra Development Tourism Region Authority (PDTRA) on Monday.

The data indicated that the rose-red city welcomed a total of 146,687 visitors in April, including 126,373 non-Arabs, 3,365 non-Jordanian Arabs and 14,052 Jordanians, in addition to 1,415 visitors as part of the “Urdun Jannah”  domestic tourism programme, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.

The number of visitors to Petra in April rose by 137 per cent compared with  last year, by 4,425 per cent compared with April of 2021 and by 6 per cent compared with April 2019, the PDTRA statistics revealed.

PDTRA Chief Commissioner Suleiman Farajat said that the increase in visitors’ numbers is attributed to the “timelessness of the city, Petra’s global importance and uniqueness, in addition to the participatory efforts made by various parties to promote the rose-red city and other tourist sites in the Kingdom”.

Farajat expects the number of visitors to continue to rise, predicting the visitor count to exceed half a million before the end of May, and to reach some one million visitors by the end of the year.

He stressed the authority’s readiness and commitment to improving the city’s infrastructure and services, noting that the second half of 2023 will witness an increase in the number of hotel rooms, with the aim of raising the number of overnight tourists in the city.