A note on timing
This article was originally written in March 2020, in real time, while we were navigating the early days of the pandemic as travelers in — and then urgently trying to leave — Jordan. We’ve edited and updated it for 2024, but we’ve preserved the essential firsthand account because we think it remains useful as a record of what that period looked like from the ground.
If you’re planning travel to Jordan now, the situation is completely different. For current entry requirements and travel advisories, see our safety guide and the Jordan reopening article from 2021. Jordan is fully open to tourism as of 2022 with no Covid-related restrictions.
What happened in March 2020
We were in Aqaba — midway through a two-week trip that included a week in Petra, days in Wadi Rum, and was supposed to end with diving off the Red Sea — when Jordan began closing its borders. The announcement came at midnight on March 17, 2020. Borders would close to all arrivals within 48 hours. Departures were still permitted, but the situation was evolving by the hour.
The next 36 hours involved a significant amount of phone calls.
Royal Jordanian: The national airline was, in our experience, genuinely good about the situation. We had a flight booked Amman-to-London for March 21. When we explained that we needed to move it forward to March 18, the call center — overwhelmed, clearly — was patient and helpful. They moved our flights at no change fee, citing force majeure provisions in their booking conditions. The actual change took two calls and about forty minutes of hold time, which under the circumstances felt reasonable.
The hotel refund: Our hotel in Aqaba — a mid-range property, not a chain — initially offered a credit voucher valid for 12 months rather than a cash refund. We pushed back and received a full refund within two weeks. The lesson: know your booking platform’s cancellation policy before you call. Booking.com in 2020 was handling force majeure refunds on a property-by-property basis; direct bookings were simpler.
Tour operators: We had a half-day snorkeling trip booked for the day after Jordan closed. The operator refunded us within 24 hours, without us asking. This is not universal experience — we heard of other operators who were less forthcoming — but it was our experience.
What those days looked like on the ground
Jordan’s lockdown in March 2020 was one of the strictest in the region. The government moved quickly: a dusk-to-dawn curfew within days, then stricter movement restrictions, then a general national lockdown that lasted through April. Police enforced the restrictions seriously. The streets of Aqaba, usually busy with Gulf tourists and divers, were empty within hours.
We drove from Aqaba to Amman on the morning of March 18 — a three-and-a-half-hour drive through the Desert Highway — and the road was nearly empty. We counted perhaps a dozen other vehicles in the first two hours. The petrol stations were open but staffed by masked attendants who gestured at hand sanitizer dispensers before accepting payment.
Queen Alia Airport in Amman on March 18 was eerie but functional. Flights were still operating to Europe and North America, though the departure hall was quiet in a way airports never are. We flew out via Istanbul on a code-share — three hours’ wait, the terminal almost empty, every other seat taped off in the boarding area.
The refund landscape: what actually worked
We tracked the refund process across all our bookings over the following six weeks. Here’s what the resolution looked like:
- Flights (Royal Jordanian + Turkish): Full refund or free reschedule — both honored. Processing time 4-8 weeks.
- Hotels (direct bookings): Refunded, 2-4 weeks.
- Hotels (Booking.com): Credit first, then full refund after escalation — roughly 6 weeks.
- Activities (GYG / GetYourGuide): Automatic vouchers offered first; cash refunds available on request within the platform. Processing 3-5 weeks.
- Car rental: This was the most difficult. The company initially refused a full refund for unused days, citing the rental agreement terms. After two weeks of correspondence, they settled on a partial credit.
Lesson: the platforms that handled Covid refunds best were those with clear force majeure policies written into their terms and conditions before the crisis. GetYourGuide handled it better than most.
What the Jordanian experience of the closure looked like
The thing we’ve thought about most since, in hindsight, is what the closure meant for the people whose livelihoods depended on the tourism season that simply didn’t happen.
Jordan’s tourism sector accounts for roughly 14% of GDP in a good year and employs a significant proportion of the workforce in Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, and Amman’s service industries. The closure wasn’t a disruption; for the people running camps in Wadi Rum, managing horse stables in Petra, guiding travelers through Jerash — it was a complete stop.
The Jordanian government introduced some support measures: liquidity assistance for hotels, reduced utility rates for tourism businesses, loan repayment deferrals. These helped the larger operations. The smaller, informal tourism economy — the man renting his family’s second house as a guesthouse in Wadi Musa, the woman selling embroidery at the Petra gate, the independent guide operating without a business license — received less.
We kept in touch with people we’d met on previous visits. A guide in Wadi Rum who used the quiet to renovate his camp; a Petra tour guide who spent the year writing a history of the Nabataean trade routes; a restaurant owner in Rainbow Street who pivoted entirely to delivery and managed to keep four of her five staff employed. The resilience was not surprising — Jordan has absorbed worse disruptions in its recent history — but it was moving to witness.
What we would do differently
With the knowledge we now have about how pandemic travel disruptions unfold, here’s what we’d change:
Book refundable rates where possible. The premium for flexible bookings — typically 10-20% more expensive — looks very different when a global pandemic closes borders. We had a mix of refundable and non-refundable bookings, and the non-refundable ones were considerably more painful to resolve.
Know your travel insurance policy before you need it. Our policy covered medical emergencies but did not cover “disinclination to travel” due to pandemic conditions. Pandemic-specific coverage didn’t really exist in March 2020; by 2021 it did. Check explicitly.
Carry enough cash. In the scramble to leave, we had sufficient JOD for the airport but not much extra margin. If the cash withdrawal situation had deteriorated (it didn’t, but it could have), we’d have had a problem.
Have a plan for your accommodation. Hotels locked down in Jordan were closed to external visitors but — at least in March 2020 — continued to house existing guests who couldn’t leave. Know whether your hotel has this policy.
Don’t assume the tour operator side will be as flexible as the hotel side. Our experience was positive, but we heard from other travelers who had significant difficulty recovering costs from small-tour-operator bookings made outside of platforms with consumer protection provisions. Book through established platforms where possible.
Lessons for future disruptions
We’re not predicting another pandemic. But travel disruptions — political, environmental, health-related — happen. A decade of travel has given us a set of habits that served us relatively well in March 2020 and would serve us better now:
Keep digital copies of every booking confirmation, travel insurance policy, and contact number, accessible offline. Know which of your credit cards includes travel delay insurance and which doesn’t. Have a contact in every city you visit — a hotel number, a local fixer’s WhatsApp — for situations where the standard channels stop working. And accept, as a philosophical position, that travel involves a real and irreducible element of the unknown.
Jordan in 2020 was not a disaster. It was a disruption, resolved by competent people on both sides, with most financial losses eventually recovered. That’s actually the best you can hope for when the world goes sideways.
The silver lining: what Jordan looked like at the start of lockdown
This is purely personal and perhaps morbid, but: the Aqaba waterfront in the last 24 hours before closure was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen there. No jet skis. No tourist boats. The Red Sea completely flat. Visibility in the water so clear you could see coral formations from the surface. A group of children running on the empty corniche. A fisherman who looked startled to be the only person on the public beach.
Jordan without tourists is a different place. Still Jordan — still hospitable, still beautiful — but stripped of the overlay of the tourism economy. We sat on the hotel terrace that last evening and watched the Sinai mountains across the water go purple in the dusk, and the only sound was the sea.
It wasn’t how we wanted to see it. But it was something.
For planning your trip today, Jordan is entirely open. Our 7-day itinerary is up to date for 2024 conditions. The Aqaba destination page covers the Red Sea experiences we were planning when the world stopped.