Dana Guesthouse, Feynan Eco-lodge awarded TripAdvisor 2015 Certificate of Excellence

AMMAN — Two of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature’s (RSCN) properties were awarded the TripAdvisor 2015 Certificate of Excellence, an award based on travellers’ reviews. 

The Dana Guesthouse and the Feynan Eco-lodge in Dana Biosphere Reserve won this year, according to the TripAdvisor website, which also announced that the Feynan Eco-lodge entered the Certificate of Excellence Hall of Fame for winning the certificate for five consecutive years.

“This unique accolade is granted only to those businesses that have won the Certificate of Excellence for five years in a row,” TripAdvisor said on its website.

The travel website also said that it was “delighted to award Dana Guesthouse the 2015 Certificate of Excellence. This achievement is a direct result of your consistently great reviews from TripAdvisor travellers.”

The TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence award recognises establishments that consistently earn great reviews from travellers and is given to accommodations, restaurants and attractions listed on the website.

Situated deep in Wadi Araba’s remote landscape, the Feynan Eco-lodge forms the western gateway of the Dana Biosphere Reserve, and provides a unique experience in desert accommodation. 

The candle-lit eco-lodge offers 26 rooms for tourists wishing to explore an undiscovered and archeologically rich area of Jordan, according to the RSCN website.

The Dana Guesthouse, which is perched on the edge of Wadi Dana, offers views of the reserve and traditional Arabic food and service. It contains nine bedrooms, most with private terraces, as well as facilities for courses and conferences. The guesthouse is open all year round, the RSCN said on its website.

The Dana Biosphere Reserve, which features steep mountains, deep valleys and plains, houses a range of tourist facilities, including a campsite. 

Spread over 300 square kilometres, the reserve is located in Tafileh Governorate, 180km southwest of the capital.

Dana is Jordan’s largest and most diverse nature reserve with 833 types of vegetation constituting 50 per cent of the total flora in the country.

Established in 1989, the nature reserve is globally important for being the southernmost remaining forest community of pencil pine and for containing three rare plants that exist only in Dana. The reserve is also an important bird-watching site as it is home to 216 kinds of birds, many of which are globally threatened, and 38 mammals, mainly the Nubian ibex, Eurasian lynx, hyenas and Blanford’s fox.

RSCN Director General Yehya Khalid highlighted the importance of the recognition in promoting the two properties both globally and locally, noting that TripAdvisor is a website that relies on travellers’ feedback. 

“Winning the award shows that the feedback about the two accommodations is consistently positive. This in turn means that the visitors are happy about the place, and they are also happy about the level of service at both places,” Khalid told The Jordan Times on Friday.

President of TripAdvisor for Business, Marc Charron, noted that “by putting a spotlight on businesses that are focused on delivering great service to customers, TripAdvisor not only helps drive an improvement to hospitality standards around the world, it also gives businesses both large and small the ability to shine and stand out from the competition.”

TripAdvisor, a travel site, enables travellers to plan and book for their trips. It offers advice from real travellers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features with links to booking tools that check hundreds of websites to find the best hotel prices, according to its website.

TripAdvisor-branded sites make up the largest travel community in the world, reaching 315 million monthly visitors, and featuring more than 200 million reviews and opinions covering over 4.4 million accommodations, restaurants and attractions. The sites operate in 45 countries worldwide, according to its website.