Cranes work day and night to complete the 365-room Kempinski resort on the Dead Sea. Nearby, a cluster of resorts is doing unprecedented business. The activity hails the emergence of Jordan's once sleepy border strip with Israel as a top regional retreat with a diverse clientele from global executives and Gulf businessmen to US commanders taking a break from conflict in Iraq
Since last year international hotel chains in Jordan have seen almost full occupancy rates for the first time since a multi-billion-dollar investment spree a decade ago by investors pinning hopes on an elusive Middle East peace dividend.
"The tourism boom in the last 12 months including the buoyant business activity has almost doubled occupancy levels at the country's five star hotels to a high of 85 percent," said Michael Nazzal, president of the Jordan Hotel Association.
After lagging behind its competitors like upscale rebuilt downtown Beirut, or metropolitan Cairo, Jordan's capital Amman is catching up as a regional business and tourism hub where once quiet neighbourhoods are now dotted with lively night spots.
Commercial streets are crowded with the latest US franchised food outlets and shopping malls.
Industry executives said Jordan's resort business was benefiting from regional political uncertainty diverting holidaymakers to the country along with a post Iraq war boom fuelled by demand from wealthy Iraqis to US servicemen on their way to Iraq or using the country as a logistics base.
"We are benefiting from being a gateway to Iraq and Palestine," said Saleh Refai, general manager of Zara Investment Holdings, the country's largest hotel investment holding firm.
The expanding business was transforming the country with its 18,000 hotel room capacity into a regional corporate conference hub, drawing multinational to UN bodies and international charities from Europe and Asia.
The kingdom boasts a capacity of more than 5,000 five-star hotel rooms.
Jordan's Western tourists are trickling back after their numbers dropped dramatically following a pullback in travel after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Some 1.74 million tourists stayed overnight in Jordan last year, a 7.4 percent increase from the previous year.
Busloads of tourists near downtown Amman's Roman amphitheatre and other sites where groups of Spanish, Italian and German tourists mingle with locals have become a common sight, tour operators say.
"European and even American tourists are slowly coming back to Jordan which they had shunned because of fears of troubles in Iraq and Palestine," said Nassar Kawar, head of Petra Tours.
Arab Gulf tourists deterred by bad news and violence in Lebanon and Egypt are also switching this summer season to Jordan - seen as a safe haven from violence.
Official figures show that Arab Gulf arrivals rose 32 percent to 466,592 in 2004 from the previous year.
"Gulf visitors are our main tourists and we hope to have bigger arrivals," said Mazen Homoud, head of the Jordan Tourism Board, the official marketing body that had focused this year on a promotion campaign to attract high spending tourists.
The tourism boom is encouraging more reliance on the industry which officials say has attracted $1.7 billion of local and foreign investments in recent years and is now the country's biggest foreign exchange earner.
"We have high expectations of sustainable growth and the recent upgrading of the infrastructure of tourism is showing results," said Alia Bouran, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities.
Bouran said investors were attracted by unprecedented tax incentives to foreigners, citing large projects under way such as resorts in the Red Sea town of Aqaba, once a drab port.
She said the outlook for the year was even more promising than last year when receipts rose to $1 billion, a 4.5 percent rise from the previous year.
Industry experts reckon the country which officials tout as one of the region's fastest-growing tourist destinations was also poised to cash in on a growing trend for religious, archaeological and ecological tourism.
The city of Petra, the country's main tourist magnet, was seeing this year a three-fold rise in visitors, mostly Europeans and some Americans, Bouran said.
But Bouran cautioned that ambitious plans could falter if the region's political turmoil spills over into wider bloodshed.
"The tourism sector is very fragile, it is highly dependent on what happens around us and the fear factor is still there with the image of the Middle East as a trouble spot, but we promote Jordan as a safe stand alone destination," Bouran added.
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