Kimkim Trip Reviews for Jordan

On this trip, my wife and I visited Amman (of course) Jerash, the Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum and Aqaba.

Overall, we really enjoyed the trip, the organization of it by the local specialist, Samir, and the driving and company of Majd, our main driver throughout the trip.

Every place was amazing so it is difficult to say which was best. For sure, Wadi Rum is unlike any other place we have seen. Roman ruins are not unique to Jordan, but Wadi Rum is. Petra was also a fascinating place.

Interacting with Jordanians was wonderful. They are so kind, helpful and welcoming. We were asked multiple times per day, by many people, whether we liked Jordan.

It was also interesting to see the range of hand-made goods for sale, from woven Bedouin cloth and handmade knives to the mosaic work.

Hotel Review

Hilton Dead Sea Resort & Spa

Sweimeh

Fantastic location by the edge of the Dead Sea. We did not go for the resort experience but, rather, to spend some time in and beside the Dead Sea. The hotel had multiple options for eating as well as room service, of course. We upgraded our room to one which had a balcony overlooking the Sea which made our evening at the hotel that much more pleasant.

Tips for future travelers

Ask for a room with a balcony on a higher floor, overlooking the Sea.

Authenticity & Character

It is a Hilton Hotel, so not "local" in any sense.

Location

Staff

Staff were great everywhere

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Review

Meet & Assist - Queen Alia Airport

Jordan

This was really helpful as it saved us a lot of time going through immigration and obtaining our visas.

Quality of Experience

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Transport

All places we visited were wonderful. Our highlight was the dessert stay and visiting Petra as well as floating in the Dead Sea.

Hotel Reviews

Toledo Hotel

Amman

The first room I was offered had a small double bed and we changed the room to a twin bed. Hotel was nice but bathroom looked a bit tired and need of modernisation.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Clean fridge and bath room. Some mould on bathroom tiles and hairs in fridge. However the room was nice.

Marina Plaza Tala Bay

Aqaba

The first room we were offered was very dirty and we changed to another room. Hotel looks very tired especially the rooms and bathroom and need of refurbishment. The restaurant, food and pool area are very nice. Also the location of the hotel.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Clean rooms and bathroom

Holiday Inn Dead Sea Resort

Sweimah

Excellent hotel lovely clean room and excellent buffet and pool area.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Petra Corner Hotel

Wadi Musa

Bathroom looked tired. Room was nice

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Aladdin Camp

Wadi Rum, Aqaba

Excellent stay. Lovely tent and great location. Staff was very friendly and helpful. Delicious dinner and nicely prepared breakfast. Highly recommend a stay here.

Authenticity & Character

The campsite with the fire place and traditional cooked dinner was very nice

Location

While setting of the camp was very nice as well as our tent with nice views of the dessert

Staff

Excellent customer service, very friendly staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Review

Amman/ Madaba/ Mount Nebo/ Little Petra/ Petra (269 KM)

Jordan

Quality of Experience

Excellent holiday

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Our tour guides was really good. Ahmed was an excellent driver/tour guide. Very knowledgeable, professional, friendly, helpful, caring, always polite and he made our trip an memorable experience. I would highly recommend him as a driver. Ahmed looked after us well. Also Refreshment drinks were filled up every day and he is very knowledgeable about Jordan culture. It was a real pleasure traveling with him and made it a special experience. He also bought us a present and birthday cake which was very kind of him and touching.

Transport

Nice car and we had such a wonderful driver called Ahmed who looked after us well. I would highly recommend him again. He is a very kind and professional person, helpful, caring, friendly and looked after us during the whole trip. Refreshment drinks were filled up every day and he is very knowledgeable about Jordan culture. It was a real pleasure traveling with him and made it a special experience.

I strongly recommend using KimKim for your Jordan tour. We have just returned from a 10 day tour , tailored made to include all of our wishes. Nada , the local specialist assisted us through several changes of plans and rescheduled trips due to pandemic, also answered all of our concerns pre departure. Our driver/ guide was exceptional, Emad Fraihat was good company, extremely informative but more than that , he was kind and thoughtful and did everything possible to enhance our trip. I recommend all the places visited Amman, Jerash, of course Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba and finally the Dead Sea. Please give yourselves enough time at Petra, it is an amazing place.
No complaints regarding the accommodations en route. The food was good , we are not meat eaters but we could always find fish or veggie dishes. Wine was good too , when available.
Jordan is one of the most interesting and varied country to visit. With THE most hospitable and kindest people you will ever meet. Thank you to Nada and Emad for such a wonderful trip.

Samir was great to work with, and both knowledgeable and patient in helping put together an ideal itinerary within my time frame and budget. It made for a well organized and a perfectly paced trip across the major sites across Jordan. Will recommend him to Friends & Family!

The tour that Samir put together for our family of four (parents and two kids 9 and 11) was fabulous. Samir was very responsive when we had to change our travel dates because of flight changes. We spent a glorious 8 days touring Jordan with our amazing driver Nader (Nick). Nader is kind, generous and very knowledgeable about Jordan. Nader recommended we extend our jeep tour of Wadi Rum to a full day. It was the best decision, the desert is beautiful and my kids loved every moment of it. If I had more time I would spend two days in Wadi Rum taking a jeep ride. Also, if I had more time, I would have spent two full days in Petra as opposed to the one day we had. Petra is just too big to properly see in one day. Overall, this was a memorable trip for all of us.

Hotel Review

Strand Hotel

Amman

Activity Review

Meet & Assist - Queen Alia Airport

Jordan

We had an amazing time in Jordan! Oriana was incredibly helpful during the planning stages and created a seamless plan for us. She was always prompt with replies to my many questions. Mohamed was a fantastic driver and host for us and we enjoyed every minute with him in the car. He was always perfectly on time to pick us up so we had no delays. We loved going to Petra, staying in Wadi Rum, and swimming in the Dead Sea. We will definitely use KimKim again when planning future trips!

Hotel Review

Wadi Rum UFO Luxotel - Campsite

Wadi Rum, Petra

We loved staying at the UFO Luxotel - even though we were there during a cold spell we enjoyed our stay very much. It was so fun staying out in the desert and looking at the night sky. The food was yummy and the staff was friendly and helpful.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Review

Petra by night

Petra

We had read about this experience on Trip Advisor being a disappointment but we did not feel this way at all. We ended up leaving toward the later side and were able to have a fairly quite walk through the Siq with little other tourists. We enjoyed seeing Petra with the candles and listening to the music.

Quality of Experience

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Transport

We recently did an 8 night tour of Jordan, visiting Amman, Dana Biosphere, Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba and the Dead Sea. We arranged the tour only 2-3 weeks before we left (as COVID rules eased), but Samir was still able to arrange everything in a few days and communication worked well in terms of figuring out a few options. Overall all the timings and logistics all went to plan and it was a well-put together schedule. Our guide for the week Bassam was great - he clearly enjoys being a guide and telling people about Jordan and showing them a few extra places and things they wouldn't find by themselves. He was also a very safe driver. We didn't feel rushed at all and the trip felt relaxed, even though we only spent 1-2 nights in each location. This trip lived up to our expectations and thanks again to Samir and Bassam.
Sam & Grace

Amazing trip! We enjoyed ourselves so much with the tour. Nada and Kim Kim make it really personal. We learned a lot from the culture and from the country. It was a 10-day tour but with so many activities it felt longer.
I can only recommend Nada and Emad (guide/driver) to anyone who wants to experience the culture and highlights in Jordan.

Best Fausto

Nothing short of an awesome, awesome trip!
Everyone we interacted with was 5 star++. Each individual really ensured that we experienced everything we had on our list, and there was a bonus...each made sure that we had the opportunity to see/do things we hadn't even thought to mention. Special shout outs to: Bassam our entertaining and dedicated driver who took really good care of us during our six day stay; Nad, our extremely knowledgeable guide who so patiently attended to a myriad of questions at Jerash; Basil, who made sure we got the very most out of our day in Petra; Mustafa, who effortlessly managed our bumpy start due to a split arrival; Samir, who pulled the whole trip together with apparent (at least to us) ease.
Highlights of the trip? Oh, there were so many: "Wheel of Fortune" in Arabic on the hotel television; the well-preserved ruins of Jerash; the Citadel overlooking Amman; a traditional Jordanian meal in Amman's bustling city center; the exquisite mosaics and ancient history in the area of Madaba and Mount Nebo; Petra by candlelight; trekking all of Petra by day; the entire Wadi Rum experience (the beauty of the desert, accommodations in "bubbles" and oh...the delicious entrees and preparation); becoming familiar with Bedouin culture; the incredible Dead Sea; the beauty of the region as viewed during our daily drives.
What a truly special - and extraordinary - experience! Deep gratitude to all who made it so!

Of course I have returned from Jordan with memories of an incredible experience. This was wholly due to my companions and attentive and responsive guide, Nader. I enjoyed the experience of the pre-travel planning on the kimkim platform. I appreciated having access to a shared itinerary too.
My recommendations: Nader our guide should and could have been the welcoming agent. The welcome agent was pleasant but unsure the purpose of this introduction. We asked where to eat on our first evening and told to walk in a certain direction to many restaurants. This was not the case. We walked across 6 lanes of traffic to only one offering for food. We didn’t see Amman that evening this was an oversight. The souq the ruins traditional Jordanian women clothing could have been seen.
Once Nader was actioned and arrived at the hotel on day 2, the adventures began.
He is interesting and interested in his clients. He assessed our knowledge and needs throughout the trip, responding with information and experiences that added another layer of value to the trip.
Accommodation: night 1 and 2 fine. Wadi Rum accommodation excellent! Petra hotel was cold and toilet broken. Hotel was very shabby. But staff were responsive and made immediate repairs. Final nights were in a hotel which was cold again no extra bedding on request as staff were at home I believe. Breakfast was outstanding but coffee undrinkable.
Tours: I only want to mention Petra guide. He was very patient and very quiet. More information was shared going around petra sights. We then took pre arranged walk through back door as it was called. This was where problems started and confidence in the group dropped. We traversed around dangerous rocks and mountainside. The guide clearly got lost at times, calling out to a passing bedouin boy for directions. The hike/climb got very dangerous in parts and we ladies had to use our experience to support each other. Three times the guide was asked to slow down and walk at the pace of the slowest. Many times he was asked to keep us updated but he didn’t. Many times we had no internet connection and not able to connect with Nader. Once we could we felt assured that someone was looking out for us.
I want to highly commend Nader individually as a guide, an experienced human who purpose was to deliver a trip to Jordan we will never forget. Nader is solution focused and no request was too much. Please acknowledge him in your organisation as a lead guide. Thank you

The three of us had the best trip in Jordan and were exceptionally well cared for by Nader "Nick" T. our guide, advisor and driver. Even a medical emergency was well cared for by Nick with humour and goodwill. Although we never met Samir in person, he checked in with us when necessary, but not overly. The tour was flexible and responsive to our needs and last-minute changes. In advance of the tour the Kim Kim dashboard provided us with a clear idea of what we would see and do, as well as what we could expect from the hotels. The dashboard is a good communication clearinghouse as well for three participants in different parts of the globe to prepare in advance their tour. We requested a moderately priced tour and that is what was delivered. The weather was exceptional and made for perfect hiking conditions which is what we did most days. I wish we had had more time in Jerash, Amman - but we spent too much time enjoying the Ajloun forest hiking... Wadi Rum hospitality was great, and the places and spaces are magical. I appreciated our cook and our bedouin guide at Enjoy camp. The boulder-climbing/hiking at Dana Reserve was an experience we won't forget at all. Petra... Totally amazing. We hiked 20 km that day, then returned for the evening candlelilght (2more Km). The candlelight evening was another magical experience -- even if touristy, the place is redolent with mystique and deep history. Jordanians are so hospitable and rightly proud of their magnificent heritage sites. We felt safe everywhere we went, and at the same time felt we were out on an adventure beyond the average.

Had a wonderful time and felt safe and well cared for. Nader was a fun and excellent driver and tour guide. Especially loved Petra, Jaresh and Wadi rum. Would recommend this tour.

Our honeymoon trip to Jordan was amazing. Having secured a great deal, Samir managed to book amazing hotels and created a wonderful programme in Jordan. He also was in regular contact with us to make sure everything is up to high standards. He solved some hotel issues instantly and efficiently (we didnt have to worry about a thing). If you want to visit Jordan then Samir is your guy.

We were treated with respect and everybody was very nice and friendly.

Our guide and driver Sulaiman was very friendly and knowledgeable as well as flexible. What ever questions we asked about regarding history, shops, coffee, diving, etc.. he always had the answer.

Visiting Jeresh, Petra (one of the seven wonders), camping in Wadi Rum and diving in the red sea in Aqaba were the highlights of our trip.

Hotel Review

Sulaf Hotel Suites

Amman

Amazing, very friendly

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Review

Meet & Assist - Queen Alia Airport

Jordan

Very professional, smooth process

Quality of Experience

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Transport

Nada was responsive and offered alternatives. Was willing to accommodate changes.

Oriana did a really good job. She promptly implemented our inputs/comments and was also easily reachable throughout the vacation. All in all there was just one minor misunderstanding, which was solvable on site and thus it was a really good experience.

It was the first time, that my boyfriend and I booked a tour in another country through a company instead of just going and the experience was great! Oriana planned everything according to our wishes and made adaptions that we wanted. In Jordan itself everything worked out perfectly except for one situation which was also handled directly on site by our driver Mahmoun and in the end worked out as planned. So we would definitely recommend you to book through Jordan Select Tours and Oriana, and we can also recommend Mahmoun as a driver, he was always on time and very friendly.

Everything was great but I will mention 2 things. The driver on the first day booked me on a ‘boat tour with lunch and swimming and snorkelling’ out of Aqaba (I had told him that I would love to go snorkelling). It was a disaster, do not recommend again. I was the only one on the whole boat going in the water, there is no reason to snorkel as there is absolutely nothing to see…total waste of time!
The Hotel Kempinski was wonderful, recommendation from the driver to dive with Aqaba Shark diving and Talal was a wonderful experience. Thanks.
The driver that picked me up for my flight back to Amman arrived early, had not been to the airport in over 2 years so not quite sure where to go. He dropped me in a parking spot from where I could not see an entrance. There was nothing happening. The first set of doors that I found, no one there, the nest set were locked. Finally, I followed another van coming in and walked to where they were and found the departures entrance. Nothing was open. I was picked up at 3:15 pm for a 6:25 pm flight and the airport was not even staffed until after 5:15pm. I should have stayed at the hotel and I should have had a driver that knew where the entrance was. I realize that tourism is just reopening but I do think that these two things could easily be improved. Thanks for organizing, thanks for listening. I very much enjoyed my 11 days in Jordan.

We are a family travelling with two adult daughters and from day one our interaction with Oriana was positive . She is prompt in her replies and experienced with meticulous planning of our trip . Good communication always and made good suggestions for places to visit and hotels.
Our driver Khaled was excellent with good communication skills and he went the extra mile for us . He was always on time and sometimes treated us on extras like coffee and sweet treats . He had good suggestions on local eateries .
Basil , our local guide in Petra was also very knowledgeable and exceptionable .
The other local guides in Jerash and Salt were adequate

Samir was quick to respond and arrange a trip that fit our interests. All guides were friendly, pleasant, knowledgeable, professional. Everywhere we visited was enjoyable, especially liked Dana Reserve and Wadi Rum.

From the time of my first contact with Oriana to the end everything was perfect and our trip was a memorable one. Oriana was very patient and meticulous in helping us plan a perfect trip for us. Esam was absolutely wonderful, he was friendly, full of excellent suggestions and very flexible . Esam went above and beyond at every juncture and we as a family appreciated all that he did for us in making our Jordan holiday a memorable one. I would highly recommend Esam.
All the tour guides were wonderful too and very knowledgeable… Ebrahim at Jarash, Ashraf at Petra were really good., so was the tour guide in Wadi Rum jeep safari. Amman city tour, Jarash, Salt, Mount Nebo, Madaba, Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum and Aqaba were all part of our tour of Jordan, each place was unique and special in its own way. Esam made it easy as well through his suggestions and recommendations. It’s hard for us to choose the most memorable place as every place was stunning and unique so I would say the whole trip was absolutely fantastic. Thank you Oriana and Esam and all the tour guides for mdd as long it special for us.,