Jordan spends five months of the year being too hot to enjoy properly. Petra involves several kilometres of walking with almost no shade, and doing that in July is a form of punishment. Then the heat breaks, usually in the second half of September, and the country becomes one of the best places in the world to be in October.
The weather is the easy part. What catches people out is everything that happens before and around the walking: a visa system with a pass that has to be bought before you fly, a Petra ticket with two prices depending on where you slept the night before, and a country where the distances look small on a map and take longer than expected. Most of the money you either save or waste on a Jordan trip is decided at the planning stage.
Why the timing works
October daytime temperatures in Wadi Musa, the town at Petra’s gate, sit in the high twenties Celsius, which is warm but walkable from early morning. Amman is milder. The Dead Sea, sitting four hundred metres below sea level, stays hot well into the month, and Aqaba on the Red Sea stays swimmable.
Wadi Rum is the one to plan clothing around. Desert days in October are pleasant and the nights drop sharply, which surprises people who packed for a Middle Eastern holiday and end up sitting outside a camp in a fleece. The UNESCO listing for the protected area gives a sense of what the 74,000 hectares actually contain, including 25,000 rock carvings and around 12,000 years of continuous human presence, which is worth reading before treating it as a photogenic sand pit.
October is also one of the two windows when walking serious distances is comfortable. The Jordan Trail Association maintains a route running the length of the country, and autumn is when section hiking is realistic rather than punishing.
The trade-off is that everyone else has worked this out. October is high season. Wadi Musa hotels and Wadi Rum camps fill, and the good bus seats go early.
The Jordan Pass has to be bought before you land
This is the single most useful thing to know about visiting Jordan. The Jordan Pass is a government-issued bundle that waives the tourist visa fee and includes entry to more than forty sites, Petra among them. It comes in three tiers, priced by how many days at Petra you want: 70 dinars for one day, 75 for two consecutive days, 80 for three. A dinar runs about 1.40 US dollars.
The arithmetic is not subtle. A visa on arrival costs 40 dinars. A single day at Petra costs 50. Buying those two separately comes to 90 dinars before you have seen anything else, against 70 for the cheapest pass. Jerash, Wadi Rum, the Amman Citadel and Karak are then included on top.
Three conditions matter. The pass must be purchased before you arrive in Jordan, because it cannot be bought at the border or the airport. The visa waiver only applies if you stay at least three consecutive nights, and immigration checks this on the way out, so a two-night stopover means paying the visa fee on departure anyway. And the pass does not cover Petra by Night, the candlelit walk through the Siq, which is a separate ticket of around 17 dinars.
One warning about buying it. The official site is jordanpass.jo, run by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. There are several lookalike domains with similar names that market the pass and sit high in search results. Type the official address rather than clicking the first result you see.
Petra charges two different prices for the same day
Petra’s ticketing is run by the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority, and its fee structure divides visitors into two categories that are easy to fall the wrong side of.
An accommodated visitor, meaning anyone who has spent at least one night in Jordan, pays 50 dinars for one day, 55 for two consecutive days or 60 for three. A non-accommodated visitor, meaning a day-tripper who has not stayed a night in the country, pays 90 dinars for a single day. Children under twelve enter free during daylight hours. The full table sits on the authority’s own ticketing site, and multi-day tickets have to be used on consecutive days, not spread across a fortnight.
That gap of 40 dinars catches two groups. The first is anyone doing Petra as a day trip from outside the country. The second, and more avoidable, is anyone who lands in Jordan in the morning, drives straight to Petra and goes in the same afternoon, before having slept a night anywhere. Arriving the evening before and entering the following morning is the cheaper trip and also the better one, since Petra rewards being at the Siq early. The tourism board publishes its own breakdown of what a Petra visit costs including the extras that are not in any pass.
Arriving through Aqaba changes the visa maths
Most visitors fly into Queen Alia International in Amman. The alternative is King Hussein International at Aqaba, in the south, which sits inside the Aqaba Special Economic Zone.
Entering through Aqaba can mean the 40 dinar visa fee is waived under the zone’s own rules, separate from the Jordan Pass. The conditions attached to that waiver are reported inconsistently, and have involved things like registering locally within a set window or leaving through the same border you entered by. Anyone planning to rely on it should confirm the current terms with the zone authority rather than a travel forum, because the fallback is simply paying the fee on exit.
For a standard itinerary the Aqaba route has a different appeal anyway. Landing in the south puts Wadi Rum an hour away and Petra about two, which reverses the usual direction of travel and avoids doubling back.
Getting from the airport, and getting between places
Queen Alia International sits roughly 35 kilometres south of Amman. Sariyah Express runs an airport bus from outside arrivals to the Seventh Circle in west Amman and to the North Station, at around 3.4 dinars, which is the cheapest way into the city by a wide margin. Official metered taxis from the rank run roughly 25 to 30 dinars into central Amman. Ignore anyone approaching you inside the terminal.
For Petra, JETT runs a daily coach from Amman, taking somewhere between three and a half and four hours and costing around 10 to 11 dinars. It typically leaves early in the morning and returns from Petra in the late afternoon, which makes a same-day return technically possible and not advisable. Seats sell out in October, and the timetable shifts on weekends and during Ramadan, so book ahead and check the date rather than the general schedule. A fixed-fare airport taxi direct to Petra runs around 85 dinars.
Hiring a car is the option most people end up preferring, because Jordan’s sites are strung out and the buses run once a day. The distance from Amman to Petra is about 235 kilometres. On the Desert Highway that is roughly three hours of dull but efficient driving. On the King’s Highway it is five or six, through Madaba, Karak and Dana, and it is one of the better drives in the region. The mistake is planning the King’s Highway as a transfer rather than as a day out.
Wadi Rum works differently again. Private cars stop at the visitor centre, and travel inside the protected area is by 4×4 arranged through a camp or a local operator. Budget the time: it is around 290 kilometres south of Amman and about an hour from Aqaba.
If the flight out goes wrong
Most European visitors reach Amman on a direct flight from a hub, and October is busy enough that delays propagate. Worth knowing that EU passenger rights attach to the departure airport as well as the airline, so a delayed or cancelled flight leaving an EU airport for Amman is covered regardless of who operates it, while the return leg from Amman is only covered if the airline is EU-based. The details of what airlines actually owe under EU261 decide whether a ruined first day is compensable or simply bad luck.
Two sentences summarise the rest. Buy the pass before you fly, and sleep one night in Jordan before you walk into Petra. Almost every expensive Jordan mistake is one of those two, made in the wrong order.
