1.5m tourists arrived in Kingdom in first 5 months of 2022 — Ministry

AMMAN — A total of 1.5 million tourists arrived in the Kingdom in the first five months of the year, exceeding the expected number of the national tourism strategy for 2021-2025, which anticipated welcoming 1.25 million tourists, the Tourism Ministry said on Thursday.

The ministry's monthly bulletin said that tourism revenues in the January-May period surpassed JD1.2 billion, where estimates expected the revenues to stand at JD1 billion.

The bulletin showed a remarkable increase in the number of international visitors in the first five months of 2022 compared with the corresponding period of 2021 by 310.7 per cent.

In this regard, the ministry said that overnight tourists increased by 294.9 per cent to 1.27 million visitors, while one-day visitors rose by 435.7 per cent to some 217,000 tourists.

The month of May witnessed a "great increase" in the number of international tourists by 352.3 per cent compared with the same period of the previous year to reach around 429,000 tourists.

The bulletin attributed the increase in the number of visitors to the Kingdom and the rise of tourist revenues to the facilitated procedures that the government has adopted to alleviate the impacts of travel restrictions and procedures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous official data showed that the Kingdom's tourism income in 2021 increased by 90 per cent to reach $2.7 billion, compared with a 75.7 per cent decline in 2020, as a result of the increase in tourist numbers in 2021 to 2.358 million.