Baraka Destinations is helping redefine what tourism can look like in Jordan by building travel experiences rooted in community, culture, and care for place. Founded in 2015 by Muna Haddad as a subsidiary of Baraka Consulting, the company was created to show that community-led tourism can generate meaningful income, strengthen local enterprise, and offer travelers a deeper and more thoughtful way to experience a destination.
Working primarily in Jordan’s lesser-visited regions, including Umm Qais and Pella, Baraka Destinations partners with local residents to co-create immersive travel experiences that reflect the character, knowledge, and traditions of each place. Communities are not treated as backdrops to tourism. They are the hosts, storytellers, and entrepreneurs at the center of it. Through cooking classes, hikes, archaeological tours, craft workshops, farm visits, and home-based experiences, travelers gain a richer understanding of Jordan while local people benefit directly from the tourism economy.
Baraka Destinations grew out of Baraka Consulting, Muna’s sustainable tourism development firm, which she launched in 2012 after years of working across Jordan and the wider region on tourism strategy, destination planning, and heritage-based development. Through that work, Muna repeatedly saw communities with extraordinary cultural and natural assets that were rarely the ones shaping tourism experiences or receiving their full economic benefits. Baraka Destinations was created to change that.
Today, the company collaborates with local entrepreneurs, cooks, producers, guides, artisans, and land stewards to build tourism experiences that keep value rooted in community hands. The result is a model that creates economic opportunity while offering travelers something increasingly rare in modern tourism: authentic connection and cultural exchange.
The Baraka Destinations Origin Story
The origins of Baraka Destinations can be traced back to a question that has shaped Muna Haddad’s work for nearly two decades. Who gets to tell the story of a place?
Muna began her career at the Jordan Tourism Board, where she helped expand international tourism markets and contributed to national tourism strategy. Over time, her work led her to examine the deeper impacts of tourism and the ways value and visibility were often unevenly distributed.
She saw that many communities, particularly in rural or overlooked regions, held rich cultural knowledge, traditions, and hospitality. Yet tourism models rarely gave them meaningful ownership over how their stories were shared or how tourism revenue flowed.
That realization led Muna to found Baraka Consulting in 2012, focusing on sustainable tourism planning and community-based tourism development across the Middle East and beyond.
Consulting alone, however, was not enough.
When one of her development plans for Umm Qais stalled, Muna decided to approach the challenge differently. Instead of waiting for the model to be implemented, she began building it directly with the community. Her team met with local households, listened to their ideas, and worked together to design experiences that reflected the identity of the place and the people who lived there.
That collaborative process became the foundation for Baraka Destinations.
What began in Umm Qais eventually expanded to Pella and other communities. Today, the company stands as a working example of how tourism can create opportunity, preserve culture, and strengthen local pride when communities are fully involved in shaping the experience.
How Baraka Destinations Is Making A Positive Impact
Baraka Destinations is building a tourism model that channels value into local communities while helping protect cultural and natural heritage.
In Umm Qais and Pella, the company collaborates with more than 20 local businesses and entrepreneurs including home kitchens, honey producers, cheesemakers, weavers, farmers, guides, and outdoor activity providers. Experiences are co-created with residents and designed so tourism income reaches the people who bring each destination to life.
The company’s impact is both economic and cultural. Community-based guesthouses such as Beit Al Baraka and Beit Al Fannan serve as local hospitality hubs, creating jobs while sourcing food, services, and materials from nearby producers. Women play leading roles in food experiences, craft demonstrations, and home-based hospitality, while young people are trained as guides and cultural ambassadors. In Pella, archaeological tours are now led by the town’s first local female guides, expanding women’s leadership in heritage interpretation.
Baraka Destinations also helps preserve traditional knowledge that might otherwise fade. Travelers can participate in basket weaving using banana and palm leaves, keffiyeh tasseling, shepherding, cheese making, and seasonal agricultural activities such as olive harvesting or honey production. Environmental stewardship is also central to the model. The company also offers low-impact experiences including hiking, cycling, camping, and foraging in landscapes surrounding the Yarmouk Nature Reserve and other protected areas. Trail routes are designed to reduce environmental pressure while supporting conservation.
The results are significant. In its two current destination hubs, Baraka has created 153 jobs while 73% of tourism revenue remains within the communities involved. Prior to recent regional disruptions, participating community members were earning an average of 44% more than the national income.
Why the UnTours Foundation Invested in Baraka Destinations
We invested in Baraka Destinations because it represents the kind of tourism business we believe the future of travel depends on. The company is community-driven, culturally grounded, and designed so that local people play a central role in shaping tourism experiences and sharing the stories of their communities.
This investment was made possible with the support of Tourism Cares through the Meaningful Travel Fund, a collaborative initiative created by Tourism Cares and the UnTours Foundation to provide affordable capital to small, locally owned tourism businesses around the world. The fund supports enterprises that are advancing sustainability, strengthening community livelihoods, and protecting cultural and natural heritage in their destinations.
For more than two decades, Tourism Cares has worked with the global travel industry to ensure tourism creates positive social, environmental, and economic outcomes. Through programs like the Meaningful Travel Map, the organization connects tour operators, travel companies, and destinations with community-based enterprises that are delivering measurable impact on the ground.
Baraka Destinations exemplifies the kind of business this partnership was designed to support. Its work strengthens local economies, celebrates cultural heritage, and offers travelers deeper ways to connect with place.
Our investment is helping support the development of Baraka’s new Amman City Tour, an experience designed to introduce travelers to the capital through the people and stories that shape everyday life in the city. The tour will guide visitors through historic neighborhoods and cultural districts while highlighting local food traditions, minority communities, family-run businesses, and contemporary creative voices. Along the way, travelers will meet local entrepreneurs, artisans, historians, and community leaders who offer personal perspectives on the city’s past and present. The result is a walking experience that goes beyond sightseeing, inviting visitors to see Amman through the lens of the people who call it home.
How You Can Support Baraka Destinations
You can support Baraka Destinations by choosing travel experiences rooted in local knowledge and designed to benefit the communities you visit. Travelers can explore Baraka’s community-based experiences in northern Jordan or join the Amman City Tour to encounter the capital through stories, people, and places that many visitors would otherwise miss.
