After ticking Petra and the Dead Sea off the bucket list, we piled into the hire car for the final leg of our journey back toward Amman. We’d booked a stay at a highly-rated EcoLodge, lured in by glowing five-star reviews on TripAdvisor, a detail that will come back to haunt us by the end of this post.

The Bedouin "Chauffeur"

The "Eco" experience began with a mandatory vehicle swap. You park your car and hitch a ride with a local Bedouin in a pickup truck. It was here that we discovered the local hierarchy: western women get the front seat, while western men get the "luxury" experience of bouncing around in the back with the suitcases.

My friend was less than impressed. She spent the entire drive wearing her "touch me and I’ll punch you" face, as our driver seemed far more interested in staring at her than the unmade road ahead. To add insult to injury, we later calculated that the cost of this uncomfortable ride with our local lech was actually higher than a London black cab.

The "Zero Waste" Buffet

Dinner was a buffet served at 20:00. Being a bit peckish, I insisted we arrive ten minutes early. We found a crowd of seasoned guests already huddled together like they were waiting for a life raft.

The reason became clear the moment the food appeared: there wasn't nearly enough. If you were polite enough to turn up at 20:15, you went hungry. The lodge boasted a "zero waste" policy, which is easy to achieve when you simply don't provide enough food to create any scraps in the first place.

Stargazing and Pick-up Lines

After our meager meal, we headed to the roof to lounge on beanbags and admire the desert sky. Because the lodge is isolated from city lights, the view was genuinely spectacular. Unfortunately, the atmosphere was ruined by a different kind of "star."

One of the local guides was working the roof like a sexual predator in a planetarium. He had a practiced "pitch" for every group of female tourists, leaning in to ask if they knew the constellations before "guiding" them through the stars. When I decided to have a bit of a laugh and asked him to explain the constellations to me, he just shrugged and walked off. Apparently, I wasn’t his target demographic.

Conclusion: Don't Believe the Hype

Needless to say, we didn’t have a stellar time. Once back in the UK, we did some digital detective work on those "five-star" TripAdvisor reviews. It turns out every single one was posted by someone living in Amman, essentially a digital cheer squad of friends and family.  We noted that these people had only left one review on Tripadvisor and it was for this lodge. 

We reported the fake reviews to TripAdvisor, but we were met with a boilerplate response about "doing their best", to rid there platform of fake reviews. But when confronted with review stuffing, they did nothing. If there’s one lesson to take away from this, it's this: always look at who is writing the reviews. Do they leave other reviews and if they did what did they say.  For example, the person who loves staying in an American “box” hotel will always leave bad reviews for hotels with “character”. Plus, if every glowing recommendation comes from a local mate of the owner, run the other way.