Boutique or grand: choosing your base at Petra

At Petra, geography is everything. The ancient city has one main entrance, reached through the visitor centre at the bottom of the hill, and every hotel in the district is priced and judged by its distance from that gate. (There is also a back door on foot from Little Petra, which we come to below, but that is a hike rather than a commute.) The town of Wadi Musa spills up the hillside behind the entrance in tiers, and the rule holds almost without exception: the higher you sleep, the less you pay and the longer your morning takes. That trade — metres against money — is the whole decision. Here is how the choices stack up, and what each one costs you at six in the morning.

Key facts

• Petra rewards an early start; sleeping near the gate buys you the quiet hours before the coaches climb the hill
• Book the ticket before the room — staying overnight in Jordan roughly halves the entrance fee
• Wadi Musa town, up the hill, holds most of the budget and mid-range beds, and most of them run a morning shuttle down
• The town sits high enough that evenings are cool even in summer and genuinely cold in winter; pack a layer, and a warm one from November
• Two nights is the honest minimum. One night is a decision you will regret on the walk out

Book the ticket before you book the room

Getting this wrong is expensive, because what you pay at the gate depends on whether you slept in the country. Jordan charges a sharply reduced entrance fee to visitors who can show they are staying overnight, and a punitive one to those who cross in and out in a day. At the time of writing the overnight rate is around JOD 50 for one day in the site, about JOD 55 for two consecutive days and roughly JOD 60 for three, while the day-visitor fee runs to something like JOD 90. A modest room in Wadi Musa therefore pays for itself twice over before you have slept in it. Keep the hotel booking on your phone; you may be asked for it at the window.

Most travellers should be looking at the Jordan Pass instead. It is a government scheme, bought online before you fly, and it comes in three tiers according to whether you want one, two or three consecutive days at Petra — expect to pay somewhere around JOD 70, JOD 75 and JOD 80 respectively. It waives the tourist visa fee and covers entry to several dozen other sites, Jerash and Wadi Rum among them, so for anyone doing more than Petra alone the arithmetic is straightforward. Children under twelve are generally admitted free during daylight hours. Note that multi-day Petra tickets have to be used on consecutive days, which constrains an itinerary more than people expect.

How many nights, and in what order

One night is the standard package-tour allowance and it is not enough. You arrive in the afternoon, walk in at nine the next morning behind everyone else, and leave having seen the Treasury in hard light and company. Two nights and two days in the site is the honest minimum; three is when Petra stops being a monument and starts being a landscape.

With two nights the shape of it is this. Arrive in the afternoon, buy the ticket, and spend an hour in the Petra Museum beside the visitor centre, which sets up everything you are about to walk through. If your arrival falls on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, take Petra by Night: the Siq lit by a couple of thousand candles, typically starting around half past eight and finishing about two hours later. It is a separate ticket that the Jordan Pass does not cover, and quoted prices vary widely enough — we have seen figures from about JOD 17 up to around JOD 30 — that you should confirm the current one at the visitor centre. It is atmospheric rather than informative, and busier than the photographs suggest.

Then the full day. Through the gate as it opens, which is usually around six in the morning. The Siq takes about twenty minutes at a walk and you want to be in it alone. Treasury, Street of Facades, the Theatre, the Royal Tombs, the Colonnaded Street — then push straight on and up to the Monastery, a climb of roughly 800 rock-cut steps, before the sun is overhead. Lunch at the Basin Restaurant in the middle of the site, then work the Royal Tombs and the Al-Khubtha steps on the way back out. The upper Treasury viewpoint on the Al-Khubtha trail has been reported closed at points recently, so ask at the visitor centre on the day rather than committing your afternoon to it. Closing is late afternoon — around six in summer, earlier in winter, with last entry usually about an hour before sunset.

A third day buys the High Place of Sacrifice, Little Petra, and the back route described further down, which is our own preference for how to spend it.

At the gate: the grand answer

Directly opposite the visitor centre stands the Mövenpick Resort Petra, the classic grand base: an oriental-styled pile of carved wood, brass and courtyard fountains, with a rooftop garden terrace over the hills and a spa for the evening after. Its real luxury, though, is measured in metres. You can be walking into the Siq minutes after breakfast, ahead of every coach still climbing the hill from the highway. After a day of roughly ten kilometres in the site, the distance back to your shower matters more than any spa menu. It sits around the upper reaches of TripAdvisor's ranking for the district at the time of writing, and you will pay a clear premium over anything up the hill for the position. Our view is that on a two-night trip this is the right place to spend the money.

Beside it: history you can drink in

A few steps away, the Petra Guest House holds the curiosity that draws non-guests down the hill every evening. The Cave Bar occupies a restored Nabataean rock-cut chamber dated to around the first century, and the bar's own claim to be among the oldest drinking establishments on earth is a hard one to argue with. The hotel itself is simpler than the Mövenpick — call it three-star comfort with a five-star position — with its own Aloe Vera restaurant for breakfast and a lobby fire that earns its keep in January. For the last drink of a walking day we know of nothing else in Jordan quite like it, and you do not have to be a guest to use it.

A few minutes up the road: the mid-range sweet spot

Between the two gate hotels and the town proper is a short stretch of mid-range places still within genuine walking distance of the entrance, and this is where most travellers will find the right compromise. The Petra Moon Hotel is a couple of minutes on foot from the visitor centre and museum, with a rooftop terrace and an evening buffet that guests on the booking sites single out for value. La Maison Hotel Petra is roughly a five-minute walk, plain but well kept, and its staff have a reputation in reviews for arranging early breakfasts and taxis without fuss. Neither is a design statement. Both let you be inside the Siq at six without a car.

On the ridge: views over the valley

Higher up the road toward Taybeh, the Petra Marriott trades gate proximity for panorama: its terraces look down the great sweep of the Petra valley, and sunset from here is a nightly event that guests on the booking sites mention more often than anything else about the place. It sits a couple of kilometres out from the town centre, around five minutes by car from the visitor centre, and a typical nightly rate quoted at the time of writing is somewhere near USD 130. The Mövenpick Nabatean Castle goes further still, perched at roughly 1,400 metres with views out toward the Great Rift Valley and about ten minutes to the gate. Out on the edge of town near Moses' Spring, the Old Village Resort is built around the remains of an old stone village and trades on that setting rather than on proximity.

All three are lovely at six in the evening and a nuisance at six in the morning. You will drive or take the hotel shuttle down, and on a single-day ticket that is twenty-odd minutes you do not get back. Decide accordingly: the ridge suits three-night stays, the gate suits two.

Wadi Musa town: the honest middle

The town climbs the hill in tiers of family-run hotels, from very simple to perfectly comfortable, and the pattern is consistent — the higher up, the cheaper, and the longer the walk (or the short taxi) down to the gate. Beds in the lower tiers start at around USD 20. For budget travellers doing two or three days in the site this is where the value lives, and critically most of these places solve the morning problem themselves. The Valentine Inn, a long-standing backpacker fixture, runs free shuttles down to the entrance at roughly seven and eight in the morning with evening pickups. The Rocky Mountain Hotel, some two and a half kilometres up from the visitor centre, does the same and adds a Bedouin-style roof terrace worth the climb at dusk. Always confirm the shuttle when you book: it is the difference between a bargain and a daily taxi bill.

The town is also where you eat, and the falafel is the least of it. Al-Qantarah, a few hundred metres from the entrance, is an old family house converted into a restaurant, with a wide Jordanian buffet — mansaf, maqluba, smoked aubergine, a long table of salads — and live music most evenings; expect to pay modestly for it. My Mom's Recipe serves Jordanian home cooking in Bedouin-style tents looking out at the mountains, à la carte or buffet, and TripAdvisor's listing puts a typical head somewhere around USD 10 to 25; reviewers there return again and again to the maqluba. Inside the site, the Basin Restaurant is the practical lunch stop, and priced as the only game in the valley.

Near Little Petra: canvas, stars and a back door

North of town, past the Bedouin village of Umm Sayhoun, the country opens out toward Little Petra and Beidha, and here the accommodation changes character entirely. The Seven Wonders Bedouin Camp, family-run since around 2010, sets fixed goat-hair tents in a sheltered rock valley at Little Petra. The Ammarin Bedouin Camp, about a kilometre and a half from the Little Petra site in Beidha, is run by the Ammarin tribe through a local cooperative, with hot showers, electricity and a shuttle to Petra on request. Fire-cooked dinners, an extravagant sky, and silence you can hear.

The reason to sleep out here is not only romance. The back route into Petra starts near these camps: a walk of roughly five and a half to eight kilometres depending on the line you take, about an hour and a half to two hours to reach the Monastery from above rather than after 800 steps from below. It passes Beidha, a Neolithic settlement occupied from something like 7200 BC — a village roughly four thousand years older than the Nabataeans who carved the Treasury. Bedouin tents along the way sell tea for a few dinars; reckon on around JOD 5. You need a valid Petra ticket and you may well be asked to show it. Take a guide if you are not confident reading a desert track, and do not attempt it in the afternoon heat. Pair one night in a camp with your nights at the gate rather than choosing between them.

When in the year this works

Spring, roughly March to May, and autumn, roughly September to November, are the windows to aim for: days in the low twenties Celsius, dry, and long enough to get the Monastery done before lunch. April is glorious and crowded in equal measure.

June to August is the period to avoid if you have any choice. Wadi Musa regularly passes about 35C, the site offers almost no shade once you are through the Siq, and the sandstone radiates heat back at you all afternoon. If you must come in summer, the gate hotels stop being a luxury and become the plan: in and out early, a long siesta, back in around four.

Winter, from about November to March, is the quiet, cheap, cold option. Nights at this altitude are genuinely cold — the ridge hotels sit high enough that you will want the heating on — and it is the rainy window, which matters more than the temperature does. Heavy rain can flood the Siq and the surrounding wadis, and the authorities close the site when it does; closures are not common but they happen, and they have forced mass evacuations in the past. Check the forecast on the morning of your visit, and build a spare half-day into a winter trip rather than a tight connection onward.

Getting there, and whether you need a car

From Amman it is about 235 kilometres, roughly three to four hours down the Desert Highway. The JETT coach runs from the capital for something in the region of JOD 10 to 11 one way, typically leaving early in the morning with a return from Petra in the late afternoon; schedules shift, so check before you commit. Onward, Wadi Rum is around an hour and a half away and Aqaba about an hour or so beyond that by bus.

A car is genuinely useful only if you are staying on the ridge or at a camp, or if you want the King's Highway and its detours on the way down. If you are sleeping at the gate and walking in, you will not touch it for two days, and parking near the visitor centre is limited. Taxis within Wadi Musa are short and cheap; agree the fare first.

What to skip

Skip the horse-drawn carriage through the Siq. The short horse ride from the gate to the mouth of the Siq is generally covered by your ticket, with a tip expected; the carriage is charged separately, rattles, and robs you of an approach that ought to be taken at walking pace. Skip the donkey up to the Monastery, on welfare grounds and because the steps are the point. Skip the one-night version of this trip altogether. And if you are here for two nights only, skip the ridge view: you are buying one sunset at the price of two dawns.

How we would book it

Two nights, one full site day plus an afternoon: sleep at the gate — the Mövenpick if the budget allows, the Petra Guest House or the Petra Moon if it does not. Three nights: two at the gate and one in a camp out near Little Petra, walking in the back way on your last morning. Any length, any budget: whatever you book, ask for an early breakfast, or a packed one.

Tip: At Petra, the traveller who eats at dawn owns the Siq.