An important update for readers in 2024
This article was written in April 2021 and documents Jordan’s early reopening to international tourism after the pandemic closures of 2020. Much of the specific detail — testing requirements, vaccination certificates, health protocols — is now entirely obsolete.
Jordan has been fully open to international tourists since mid-2022 with no Covid-related entry requirements. You no longer need a PCR test, a vaccination certificate, or any pandemic-era documentation to enter Jordan. The Jordan Pass is available as before; visa on arrival is available for most Western nationalities; the sites are open and the tourism infrastructure has substantially recovered.
For current entry requirements, see our safety and entry guide. This article is preserved as a historical record of the 2021 reopening.
April 2021: Jordan tries again
Jordan made its first attempt at reopening tourism in September 2020, allowing international arrivals under strict conditions. That window closed again in October 2020 as case numbers rose. The second opening — the one that eventually became permanent — began in March 2021.
The entry requirements in April 2021 were:
- Negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of departure (later reduced to 48 hours)
- Health insurance covering Covid-19 treatment in Jordan — either a specific purchased policy or coverage via your existing travel insurance. Jordan’s Ministry of Health published a list of approved insurers.
- Health declaration form completed online before travel
- Mandatory arrival test — a rapid antigen test at the airport on arrival (cost: approximately 22 JOD, paid on site)
- Vaccination status: in April 2021, vaccination certificates were accepted for some conditions but not universally as a full substitute for testing. This changed as the year progressed.
The Jordan Pass remained available and included the visa waiver as before.
What arrivals in April 2021 actually looked like
We flew into Queen Alia Airport on a Royal Jordanian flight from London Heathrow in late April 2021. The flight was perhaps a quarter full. The cabin crew were attentive in that particular way of people glad to be working again after months of near-nothing.
Arrival was genuinely organized. Jordan’s government had created specific lanes at the airport for Covid-era arrivals: document check, health form verification, antigen test at a station set up in the arrivals hall. The test took about fifteen minutes to process; passengers waited in a socially distanced seating area. The majority of passengers tested negative and cleared quickly. We were through and in a taxi within 90 minutes of landing, which is about normal for Queen Alia on a good day.
Amman in April 2021 felt like a city slowly exhaling. The restaurants in Rainbow Street and the Third Circle area were open at reduced capacity. The Citadel had a handful of visitors but nothing like the pre-pandemic volumes. Prices at some tourist-facing businesses reflected the drop in trade: our hotel, which had been 65 JOD a night on a previous visit, was running a 40 JOD rate that spring.
Petra in April 2021
This is the part that remains, even two years later, remarkable to recall.
Petra in April 2021 was almost empty. We walked the Siq — usually a procession of visitors, horse-drawn carriages, and competing selfie angles — with perhaps thirty other people on a mid-week morning. We reached the Treasury and there were, in my count, eleven other visitors present. Eleven people in a space that usually holds several hundred.
The Treasury without the crowd is architecturally overwhelming in a different way. You can hear the wind. You can hear the rock settling in the heat. You can walk to the far left of the colonnade and stand in the shade of a carved niche and have the entire facade to yourself for several minutes at a time.
We’ve been to Petra five times now. April 2021 was the most extraordinary. Not because the site had changed — it hadn’t — but because the human overlay was stripped back to almost nothing, and the architecture asserted itself without competition.
It was, as a travel experience, irreproducible. Petra with crowds remains extraordinary. Petra without them is something else entirely.
Wadi Rum in April 2021
We drove south after three days in Amman, down the Desert Highway in rented car, Petra first, then across to Wadi Rum. Our guide in Wadi Rum — a man named Salim who had been running jeep tours since 2009 — had not worked in six months before our visit. He showed us photographs on his phone from his busiest November, 2019: twenty-four guests at a single camp, fire blazing, drumming. The camp in April 2021 had us and one other couple.
“Better for stars,” he said, which was true. Better for space, for conversation, for the kind of experience that crowds make impossible. The Bedouin guides we met in Wadi Rum during that first reopening were unanimous in something they wouldn’t say directly but implied consistently: they were glad the landscape had rested. Two years of quiet had meant less litter, fewer tire tracks in sensitive areas, more wildlife moving back toward the camps at night.
We saw a fox at 2am, walking the edge of the camp as though assessing the situation. Salim said he hadn’t seen one near a camp since 2018.
The Jordan Pass in 2021
The Jordan Pass remained available throughout the 2021 reopening, and the visa waiver component — which requires a minimum stay of three consecutive nights — was unchanged. Several travelers we met had questions about whether the Pass was still valid after having been purchased before the 2020 closure; the Jordan Tourism Board had extended validity for pre-purchased passes and the system worked without problems for everyone we spoke to.
The pass worked via QR code on the phone, as before. Site staff were scanning codes at Petra, Jerash, and the other included attractions with no issues. The only slight friction was at smaller sites — a castle entry on the King’s Highway — where the scanner equipment occasionally needed a restart.
The 2021 pass pricing was: 70 JOD (1 Petra day), 75 JOD (2 days), 80 JOD (3 days). These prices have since been revised; for current pricing see our detailed analysis at /guides/jordan-pass-guide/.
What recovered and what didn’t
By late 2021, Jordan’s tourism numbers were recovering faster than regional competitors. The country’s political stability, combined with effective management of Covid case numbers through 2020, gave travelers confidence that the reopening was genuine and maintained.
Some things didn’t come back immediately: certain camp operations in Wadi Rum that depended on volume tourism; some smaller guesthouses in Dana and Petra that had closed permanently during the long drought; a handful of tour operators who hadn’t survived the 2020-2021 period. Jordan’s tourism economy contracted significantly and the recovery was real but uneven.
By 2022, most of what had been excellent about Jordan’s tourism infrastructure before 2020 was functioning again, and a number of new things — particularly in the Aqaba diving sector and in the luxury camping market in Wadi Rum — had appeared. Several of the luxury bubble-tent operations that are now among Wadi Rum’s most photographed accommodations opened or expanded in 2021-2022, partly because the owners had time during the quiet period to build and refine them.
The Amman food scene in spring 2021
This is small and possibly trivial, but worth noting: some of the best restaurants in Amman’s Rainbow Street and Jabal Amman neighborhoods had used the quiet period to renovate. The pre-pandemic Sufra restaurant on Rainbow Street, which we’d visited before the closure, reopened in spring 2021 with a refurbished interior and an expanded Jordanian menu. Hashem downtown, which never closes and weathered the closure by pivoting to takeaway, was as good as it had ever been.
The broader Amman food culture had also changed in subtle ways: delivery apps had exploded during the lockdown period and several home-cook operations — mothers and grandmothers selling mansaf and maqluba and home-baked ka’ak biscuits via Instagram — had formalized into small catering businesses. Some of these were still operating when we visited in 2021, and tracking them down via social media was one of the genuinely new experiences the city offered.
For planning your trip today
The long and short: Jordan is back, fully and without restriction. The tourist sites are open, the Jordan Pass works exactly as it did, and the airports are operating normally.
From Amman: private driver and car service for 1–8 daysOur complete Jordan itineraries and the Petra destination guide are fully updated for 2024. The Amman destination guide covers the current restaurant landscape. Whatever you were waiting for — it’s now.