Getting home from Jordan

(last update 6/2018)

We aren't normally the type of travelers who do whirlwind trips, but given that my husband is basically getting one week off between January and Thanksgiving 😡 we're going to, uh, "whirl" a bit with this upcoming trip. We scored those sub-$2000 tickets from NYC to Frankfurt, we're taking a cheap Lufthansa flight from there to Poland for our friend's 50th, then we're taking Wizzair direct to Tel-Aviv. Once we started looking into the top sights in the area, I realized how close we'd be to Petra so we decided this is the time to cross that off the bucket list.

UPDATE: Trip report Royal Jordanian Amman – Frankfurt

Petra is happening at the tail end of our trip, so we have to find a way back to Frankfurt to connect to our flight home. There are only three border crossing points between Israel and Jordan, and crossing the border is not a trivial matter. The bus ride to Amman from Petra is 4-ish hours long. So I started poking around looking for other options and lo and behold there's a well-timed Royal Jordanian flight from Aqaba's King Hussein airport (AQJ) to Amman and then on to Frankfurt.

The gold star is Petra. Nearby airport map (click to enlarge)

Like a lot of smaller airports, they wanted a pretty penny for this flight, though – $1566 per person in Business Class to Frankfurt (or just north of $600 for Economy). With our trip already so harried, I really wanted to avoid another border crossing and/or a 4+ hour bus ride to Amman so I figured we'd just have to suck it up and pay...

But then I remembered that Royal Jordanian is a partner of British Airways and I still had 14,000 of their hard-to-use Avios points lying around. I logged in to BA.com with zero hope of finding any availability and yet, ta-da! Two seats in Business Class for 29,000 Avios and $181 per person. I transferred some Amex points to top off my account and completed the purchase. When all the math is done, that's 4.7¢ per point, one of my best redemptions since our 2016 Japan trip!