LONDON: Ryanair’s plan to launch new routes to Jordan is a “historic” move that could boost the kingdom’s tourism to pre-Arab Spring levels.
Industry providers welcomed Sunday’s announcement that the low-cost carrier will roll out 14 new routes to Jordan in 2018, bringing around 500,000 customers to the country a year and opening up new source markets from Europe.
“We put a lot of time and energy into bringing Ryanair to Jordan; this has been 10 years in the making,” said Mahmoud Freihat, area marketing manager at the Jordan Tourism Board (JTB), which is responsible for marketing the country abroad.
“It’s a big investment from Ryanair. It shows their trust in Jordan,” he added.
By the end of 2018, Amman will be connected to 10 new cities, including Milan, Budapest, Bologna, Krakow, Bucharest, Paphos, Prague, Brussels, Vilnius, and Warsaw; with a further four flights to Aqaba from Athens, Rome, Cologne and Sofia.
British taxes priced out a Ryanair flight to the UK but the government is looking at other low-cost carriers in the region to fill the gap, Freihat said.
The routes tap into the lucrative low-cost carrier market, opening the country up to a new sector of travelers.
“Low-cost airlines in Europe have changed the way people travel; people look at where they fly and go there,” said Suleiman Farajat, deputy chief commissioner for the Petra Development and Tourism Regional Authority.
Commentators pointed to a huge gap in the market in Jordan, where low-cost carrier penetration is approximately 10 percent, compared to Morocco, another MENA country on the Mediterranean, where it’s around 40 percent.
In the past, easyJet operated flights between Europe and Jordan but pulled out in 2014. Back then, Farajat said, few international tourists were coming to the region, but now, “Demand is high and it’s the right time.”
Tourism in Jordan is on the mend following a significant setback in the years after the Arab Spring. Figures released by the Central Bank of Jordan showed a 12.5 percent increase in 2017 tourism receipts.
Visitors numbers dwindled between 2011 and 2015, despite Jordan remaining stable throughout the conflict in neighbouring Syria.
However, an attack by armed gunmen on a tourism site in the city of Karak in Dec. 2016 killed 10 people, including a Canadian tourist, and left dozens injured.
“Improvement in air connectivity definitely has a positive impact on destinations’ tourism industry, as it increases tourist arrivals, spending and job creation,” World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) Research Director, Rochelle Turner told Arab News,
“Jordan has a wealth of amazing cultural and natural treasures for visitors to admire. The launch of new air routes to Jordan is good news for the country’s economy.”
According to the WTTC, travel and tourism’s total contribution to GDP was nearly 20 percent in 2016 and is forecast to rise to almost 23 percent by 2027.
“In the last two years tourism has really started to pick up - 2017 was a really good year,” Farajat, said, adding that the challenge now is to enhance tourism infrastructure to meet rising demand.
The new routes to Amman and Aqaba will bring a “tremendous increase” in visitors to Petra, he added, explaining that Jordan’s most famous attraction acts as a “barometer” for the sector.
About 620,000 tourists visited Petra in 2017, a 34 percent increase on the previous year. This year, Farajat hopes the numbers will climb to 800,000. “The benchmark is 2010 when we had one million,” he said.
Muna Haddad, managing director at Baraka, a sustainable tourism company in Jordan, is anticipating a “broader base” of visitors. “This is definitely going to expand the range of groups interested in visiting Jordan.
“Other low-cost carriers have been in Jordan before and closed down … having a government serious about creating a hospitable environment for them is really historic.”
Industry insiders have credited Jordan’s tourism minister Lina Mazhar Annab with breaking through the impasse to finalise the deal, with incentives for Ryanair, such as exemption from certain taxes and reduced landing fees.
In a statement announcing the launch, Annab said: “Ryanair’s decision to fly to Jordan sends a loud and clear message about the diversity and the untapped potential of Jordan’s tourism product. It also shows confidence in the tourism industry in Jordan, which has witnessed double-digit growth in the past year.”
Freihat said more routes will likely be added in the years ahead. “We really believe this puts Jordan in the middle of Europe,” he added anticipating that the new flights to Aqaba, a sleepy airport in south, will open up new options for visitors to Jordan’s major sites.
With Petra just an hour and a half away, Wadi Rum 45 minutes and the Dead Sea an hour and a half, he anticipates Europeans coming on long weekends to see the sites, bringing more business to single destinations and benefitting communities reliant on tourism across the country.
“We are now able to make the Kingdom more accessible to a broader segment of potential tourists … whose impact on the local economy will be substantial on every level of the tourism sector supply-chain,” Managing Director of the Jordan Tourism Board Abed Al-Razzaq Arabiyat said in a statement.
Budget flights to Europe will breathe new life into Jordan tourism
Budget flights to Europe will breathe new life into Jordan tourism
More than 4 million refugees have fled Sudan since war began, UN says
GENEVA: The number of people who have fled Sudan since the beginning of the war has surpassed 4 million, a spokesperson for the UN refugee agency said on Tuesday.
UNHCR spokesperson Eujin Byun told a Geneva press briefing that the milestone was reached on Monday and that the scale of displacement was “putting regional and global stability at stake.”
US to eventually reduce military bases in Syria to one: US envoy
ISTANBUL: The United States has begun reducing its military presence in Syria with a view to eventually closing all but one of its bases there, the US envoy for the country has said in an interview.
Six months after the ouster of longtime Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, the United States is steadily drawing down its presence as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), a military task force launched in 2014 to fight the Daesh group (IS).
“The reduction of our OIR engagement on a military basis is happening,” the US envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, said in an interview with Turkiye’s NTV late on Monday.
“We’ve gone from eight bases to five to three. We’ll eventually go to one.”
But he admitted Syria still faced major security challenges under interim leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose Islamist-led coalition toppled Assad in December.
Assad’s ouster brought an end to Syria’s bloody 14-year civil war, but the new authorities have struggled to contain recent bouts of sectarian violence.
Barrack, who is also the US ambassador to Turkiye, called for the “integration” of the country’s ethnic and religious groups.
“It’s very tribal still. It’s very difficult to bring it together,” he said.
But “I think that will happen,” he added.
The Pentagon announced in April that the United States would halve its troops in Syria to less than 1,000 in the coming months, saying the IS presence had been reduced to “remnants.”
Gaza officials say Israeli forces killed 27 heading to aid site. Israel says it fired near suspects
- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned the killing of more 30 Palestinians
- He called for an “immediate and independent investigation” into the incident
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: Palestinian health officials and witnesses say Israeli forces fired on people as they headed toward an aid distribution site on Tuesday, killing at least 27, in the third such incident in three days.
The army said it fired “near a few individual suspects” who left the designated route, approached its forces and ignored warning shots.
The near-daily shootings have come after an Israeli and US-backed foundation established aid distribution points inside Israeli military zones, a system it says is designed to circumvent Hamas.
The United Nations has rejected the new system, saying it doesn’t address Gaza’s mounting hunger crisis and allows Israel to use aid as a weapon.
The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of casualties on Tuesday.
It previously said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached its forces early Sunday and Monday, when health officials and witnesses said 34 people were killed.
The military denies opening fire on civilians or blocking them from reaching the aid sites.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates the sites, says there has been no violence in or around them. On Tuesday,
it acknowledged that the Israeli military was investigating whether civilians were wounded “after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone,” in an area that was “well beyond our secure distribution site.”
‘Either way we will die’ The shootings all occurred at the Flag Roundabout, around a kilometer (1,000 yards) from one of the GHF’s distribution sites in the now mostly uninhabited southern city of Rafah.
The entire area is an Israeli military zone where journalists have no access outside of army-approved embeds.
At least 27 people were killed early Tuesday, according to Zaher Al-Waheidi, the head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s records department.
Hisham Mhanna, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said its field hospital in Rafah received 184 wounded people, 19 of whom were declared dead on arrival and eight more who later died of their wounds.
The 27 dead were transferred to Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis. Yasser Abu Lubda, a 50-year-old displaced Palestinian from Rafah, said the shooting started around 4 a.m. in the city’s Flag Roundabout area, around one kilometer (1,000 yards) away from the aid distribution hub.
He said he saw several people killed or wounded. Neima Al-Aaraj, a woman from Khan Younis, gave a similar account.
“There were many martyrs and wounded,” she said, saying the shooting by Israeli forces was “indiscriminate.”
She said she managed to reach the hub but returned empty-handed.
“There was no aid there,” she said. “After the martyrs and wounded, I won’t return,” she said.
“Either way we will die.” Rasha Al-Nahal, another witness, said “there was gunfire from all directions.”
She said she counted more than a dozen dead and several wounded along the road.
She said she also found no aid when she arrived at the distribution hub, and that Israeli forces “fired at us as we were returning.” 3 Israeli soldiers killed in northern Gaza
The Israeli military meanwhile said Tuesday that three of its soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip, in what appeared to be the deadliest attack on Israel’s forces since it ended a ceasefire with Hamas in March.
The military said the three soldiers, all in their early 20s, fell during combat in northern Gaza on Monday, without providing details.
Israeli media reported that they were killed in an explosion in the Jabaliya area.
Israel ended the ceasefire in March after Hamas refused to change the agreement to release more hostages sooner.
Israeli strikes have killed thousands of Palestinians since then, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel that ignited the war.
They are still holding 58 hostages, a third of them believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.
Israel’s military campaign has killed over 54,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants.
The ministry is led by medical professionals but reports to the Hamas-run government.
Its toll is seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts, though Israel has challenged its numbers.
Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. Around 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the Oct. 7 attack, including more than 400 during the fighting inside Gaza.
One dead, dozens injured as quake hits Turkey's Marmaris
- One killed and dozens injured reported the interior minister
- The quake struck at 2:17 am 10 kilometers off the coast of Marmaris, the AFAD disaster agency said
ANKARA: A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Marmaris area of southwestern Turkiye early on Tuesday, killing one teenager and injuring dozens of people, the interior minister said.
A 14-year-old girl died following a panic attack and some 70 people were hurt in the province of Mugla as they rushed to find safety, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X.
There were no initial reports of buildings destroyed, he said.
The quake struck at 2:17 am (2317 GMT on Monday) some 10 kilometers (six miles) off the coast of Marmaris, the AFAD disaster agency said.
“In Fethiye, a 14-year-old girl named Afranur Gunlu was taken to the hospital due to a panic attack but, unfortunately, despite all interventions, she passed away,” Yerlikaya said.
Marmaris’ governor, Idris Akbiyik, told the station that seven people were being treated for injuries after jumping from windows or balconies in panic but there was no immediate report of any serious damage.
Turkiye sits on top of major fault lines and earthquakes are frequent.
In 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 53,000 people in Turkiye and destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in 11 southern and southeastern provinces. Another 6,000 people were killed in the northern parts of neighboring Syria.
Israel intercepts Yemen missile, Houthi rebels claim attack
- In a video statement, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group’s “missile force... carried out a military operation” targeting Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv
JERUSALEM: The Israeli army said it intercepted a missile launched Monday from Yemen, whose Houthi rebels claimed an attack targeting Israel’s main airport.
“Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in several areas in Israel, a missile launched from Yemen was intercepted,” the army said in a statement, as loud booms were heard in the skies over Jerusalem.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have repeatedly launched missiles and drones at Israel since the Gaza war broke out in October 2023 with Palestinian militant group Hamas’s attack on Israel.
In a video statement, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group’s “missile force... carried out a military operation” targeting Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.
Monday’s interception followed another the day before that was claimed by the Iran-backed rebels.
The Houthis, who say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians, paused their attacks during a two-month Gaza ceasefire that ended in March, but began again after Israel resumed its military campaign in the territory.
While most of the projectiles have been intercepted, one missile fired in early May hit inside the perimeter of Ben Gurion airport for the first time.
Israel has carried out several strikes in Yemen in retaliation for the attacks, including on ports and the airport in the capital Sanaa.
