A British adventure travel operator is planning to launch holidays in Syria “as soon as stability returns” to the war-torn nation.
The UK government has opened discussions with the Syrian rebels who toppled the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, but still urges British citizens to leave. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) remains a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK because of its past association with al Qaida, the terrorist organisation once led by Osama bin Laden.
Dylan Harris, founder of Wigan-based Lupine Travel, has run a sold-out series of trips to Afghanistan this year, and is looking to resume tours to Syria as early as April 2025.
“As soon as it becomes apparent that things are stable, I could run trips immediately,” he told the You Should Have Been There travel podcast.
The main obstacle, Mr Harris said, is red tape: “It’s difficult to know what’s going to happen with the visas at the moment – who’s going to be in charge of them, along with the processes before they can start up.
“At the moment the border with Lebanon is completely open on the Syrian side. Once you’ve completed border formalities on the Lebanese side, it’s possible to just walk right in to Syria without any checks or stamps. This is how most journalists are getting in at the moment.
“However, we won’t be running tours there until they have fixed this and there’s a fully functioning border checkpoint up and running again so that we can ensure we are all in there legally.
“I would imagine this will be in place by the new year, so then it’s just a case of waiting for tourism visas to resume. If things run smoothly with the government transition then this could be as soon as March. We’d then look to resume tours in April just after the end of Ramadan.
“Everything is in place already over there because it isn’t really that long since Syria was a big tourist destination in the Middle East.”
As recently as 2011, organisations such as Explore, Voyages Jules Verne and the Royal Academy ran tours to Syria.
At present the Foreign Office warns against all travel to Syria, “due to the ongoing conflict and unpredictable security conditions”.
UK citizens are told: “If you are a British national in Syria, leave the country by any practical means.”
The government travel warning has no legal effect, but travelling to a destination against Foreign Office advice invalidates standard travel insurance policies.
Many Lupine Travel tours are to locations on the FCDO no-go list, including North Korea and Yemen.
Mr Harris said tourism could prove valuable for Syria: “They have the hotels, they have the transport, they have all the guides who are still desperate for work.
“It would just be great to be able to get tourism booming over there again because they’ve had a very terrible time of it, from the civil war to Covid to the earthquake in Aleppo last year.”
The tour operator said that many tourist attractions in Syria remain intact.
“Obviously cities like Homs were completely destroyed. There’s nothing left, but as far as the big tourist places – they’re thankfully not overly impacted.
“Palmyra is one, the huge Roman city. Parts of it were destroyed by Isis, but a lot of it did manage to survive thankfully.
“There’s the Crusader castle, Krak des Chevaliers – and there’s Aleppo, where you can stay in Lawrence of Arabia’s hotel room in the Baron Hotel, and the Aleppo bazaar.
“Damascus itself is probably one of my favourite cities in the world. There’s so much history there and amazing people, amazing sights to see. Damascus was survived relatively unscathed.”
Writing on Syria in The Independent in 2011, travel journalist Matthew Teller said: “Walking by the Mediterranean coast, threading through the timeless streets of Damascus or clambering around a desert citadel, it is hard to reconcile Syria as a ‘rogue state’.
“For its urbane self-possession, borne out of cultural roots which plunge deeper than anything Europe can match, Syria fascinates. Above all, the joviality and irreverent approachability of the Syrian people make the greatest impression on the visitor.”
