However, if that 50K is (say) 10% of your annual budget, then spending it on ads in the tube – which give a very poor return on investment in terms of raising tourist numbers: virtually all their benefit is in intangible consciousness-raising – makes no sense. You’d do better shunting that 50K into targeted media promotions, or something that creates a bit of a buzz and has an identifiable impact… but, of course, 50K can only do that in a limited way, mostly in a very specific market niche. To get a nationwide buzz going, or to start to turn around the reputation of a whole country, you need ten or twenty times that much – so Jordan (and others) can never get close. Think of Cambodia as against Thailand, or Uganda as against Kenya.

And those Egypt ad campaigns on TV, both in the UK and globally on CNN, BBC World etc. Those 30-second spots alone probably cost more to produce and broadcast than Jordan’s entire annual tourism budget.

It’s always a balancing act. In the UK, Jordan are doing their best – with limited resources – in trying to target individual consumers with specific niche-market messages, while also focusing on important trade connections: keeping those tour operators who already take groups to Jordan happy, trying to encourage other operators to launch Jordan for their clients by hosting ‘fam’ trips to showcase new products. There aren’t many glitzy jamborees!

What you’re seeing with the flashy lunches and give-aways is Jordan’s national tourism promotion office taking the lead. In my experience they tend to think big-picture: their goal is simply to boost bottom-line numbers. It is more straightforward – and, crucially, more trackable & accountable – to spend money persuading one tour operator to start offering Jordan, and thereby bring (say) 2,000 more tourists a year, than it is to spend money trying to persuade 2,000 individuals to go on holiday to Jordan this year rather than Peru, Thailand or Egypt.

Getting positive messages about tourism through to the mass-market in the UK is incredibly expensive – and, in the case of Middle East countries in the news, incredibly difficult. Aside from anything else, Egypt is physically large enough that it is able to siphon the vast majority of its European tourists away to the remote Red Sea coasts, where they fly in & out of dedicated holiday airports and never set foot in ‘Egypt proper’: tour operators collude in this, of course, marketing their holidays as ‘Red Sea’ to avoid saying ‘Egypt’ (which might raise alarm bells).

A smaller, poorer country such as Jordan, with less experience in tourism marketing, fewer opportunities for tourism development, more limited tourism infrastructure – and, it must be said, a more equitable society – will always be playing catch-up in terms of the mass market. Where it CAN score is in niche tourism, specifically sustainability, responsible tourism and nature-based product. But they don’t bring in the numbers… or the cash…

it isn’t the movement of the currency, so much as the cost of living behind the currency.

Given your knowledge of the tourism sector in the Middle East I would be interested to get your views on whether Jordan is indeed investing its efforts at selling to the trade rather than directly to the end-consumer. And if it is, is this part of the explanation of their relative lack of success in pulling in western tourists? Travelling on the tube I see many Egyptian and Turkish tourism ads, more than for any other destination.

In the previous comment, Melissa mentioned the tourist offices – if you compare the budget for promoting Egyptian and Turkish tourism in the UK, as compared to budgets for Jordan or other countries – well, there IS no comparison. Egypt outspends them by a factor of ten-to-one.

Because of that fact alone, Egypt is able to overturn the most serious threat to tourism on the fringes of the Eurozone: a reputation for violence. As far as mass tourism goes, Jordan is perceived as rough, dangerous and rather edgy; Egypt is swanky beach resorts, cheap ‘door-to-door’ direct flights and sun/sea/sand. That’s not about reality: that’s about PR… and not even good or bad PR – simply PR budgets. Throw money at a bad reputation and it will go away. Max Clifford has made a very good living out of that.

But the fact that nobody in the British travel media picked up on the fact that YOU have picked up on, Andy – namely that Egypt is exactly the same (poor) value as the Euro countries – should be a kick in the teeth. Lazy journalism. Brilliant blogging.