Choosing a hotel near Masjid al-Nabawi for Umrah

The short answer. Madinah is forgiving. The ground is flat, the walks are short and the crowds are calmer than Makkah's, so a modest hotel here is rarely the problem a modest hotel in Makkah can be. Ask which gate the hotel sits near rather than how many metres away it is, and spend the difference on your Makkah hotel instead.

We do not publish a list of hotel names with distances beside them. Buildings change hands, they are refurbished, and a figure copied from another website is the sort of number somebody relies on and then regrets. What we can give you is how to judge one, which is more useful and does not go out of date.

Why Madinah is the easy half

• The area around the Masjid is open and flat.
• Walks that would be punishing in Makkah are comfortable here.
• The crowd behaves differently; there is room to move at most hours.
• Good hotels close to the Masjid cost noticeably less than their Makkah

equivalents.

Which is why, if your budget has to choose, it should choose Makkah. You can be close in Madinah for much less.

The question that actually matters: which gate

Masjid al-Nabawi is very large and has many gates. A hotel can be a short distance from the building and still be a long way from the gate you use, because you walk around the perimeter to reach it.

So ask: which gate is the hotel nearest, and how long is the walk to it? That is a more useful answer than any distance in metres.

What else to ask

• What is the hotel called? A name lets you look yourself.
• How long is the walk in minutes, at a normal pace, at night?
• Is there a lift, and how far is the room from it?
• Which room is the price for? Two sharing and five sharing are different

numbers in the same hotel.

• Are meals included, and which?
• Is it the same hotel for the whole stay?

When paying for closer is worth it

An older parent. Even in Madinah, the walk repeated five times a day adds up. Buy close here; it is affordable.

Small children, who will need to go back and rest in the middle of the day.

Ramadan, when the crowds make every walk longer and the close hotels go first. Book early for it.

A short stay. If you only have three nights in Madinah, losing an hour a day to walking is a larger proportion of the trip.

When it is not worth it

A fit couple on a longer stay, in a quiet month, can take a further hotel and put the money into the Makkah one, where it buys much more.

Practical things, whatever you book

• Photograph the hotel entrance on arrival and note the gate you use.
• Carry the hotel name and address in Arabic on paper.
• Agree a meeting point before you go in, every time.
• Go at the cooler hours where you can.

How many nights

Worth deciding before you compare hotels. Packages trim Madinah before they trim anything else, so check the number of nights first and the hotel second. What a package includes, line by line, is in what is included in an Umrah package.

And confirm how you get there, because the Makkah to Madinah journey is left out of more packages than people expect: how to travel from Makkah to Madinah.

Ask us for the names

Our departures name the hotels and say how many nights are in each city, on the Umrah packages page. Send us your dates, how many of you and the ages, and we will tell you which gate the building sits near, what the walk is like, and whether we would spend your money differently.