Jordan Tourism Board North America

Jordan Tourism Board North America was the North American arm of the Jordan Tourism Board, the independent public–private partnership launched in Amman in March 1998 to market Jordan as a destination; the board works through eleven representative offices in Europe and North America. JTBNA covered the United States, Canada and Mexico and was run throughout by Malia Asfour, whose own bio says she founded the office in 1996 and grew it to US$430 million in North American tourism revenue. It closed on 30 November 2025 after more than 30 years — 'three decades have passed since I started this little office that could,' Asfour wrote — and the board now lists Trove Tourism Development Advisors in New York as its North American representative. Asfour's TechTO appearance was in May 2020, in conversation with Iris Durban, then director of partnerships at TourRadar, about what reopening international travel would take. Jordan was on its seventh straight day of no new coronavirus cases; tourism, she said, 'is our oil', worth 12 to 14 per cent of the country's GDP, and the United States was its largest source market. Her argument was that destinations would compete on health and hygiene, that the pieces had to be handled end to end from the airport to the hotel room, and that transparency was the only viable posture — 'if you lose that trust, you lose the destination.' She also saw an opening: a pause in which places that had not built tourism sustainably could reflect before pressing play again.