This guide is for the son or daughter in Paris, Brussels, Montreal, London or Dubai whose mother or father has found an agency for their Umrah, often through a neighbour, a mosque announcement or a relative. You want to help without taking over. Your parents keep the decision; your job is to make sure it rests on checked facts and written answers.
What can you check from abroad?
More than most families think. The licence, the answers and the paper trail can all be handled at a distance. What you cannot do from abroad is stand in the office, look at the person behind the counter and see how they answer a question they did not expect. That part belongs to your parents, or to a relative who lives nearby.
A useful way to split the work:
- You, from abroad: the directory search, the written questions, reading the contract, keeping the folder.
- Your parents, in Morocco: the visit to the office, the signature, the payment at the counter if they pay there, and the final decision.
- Together: one message thread with the agency, in which every answer is written down.
The public warnings are there for a reason. On 12 February 2026, the Moroccan Consumer Protection Observatory issued a national alert urging people to check an agency's legal status before paying for an Umrah4. That is the whole point of what follows: check first, pay after.
Searching the ministry directory remotely
The Ministry of Tourism publishes the travel-agency directory on mtaess.gov.ma, including the lists of ODV and DV agencies licensed under Law 11-16; the path is Directories, then Travel agencies directory1. On the French pages we link to, those menus read “Annuaires” and “Annuaire des agences de voyages”. Reading a public list needs no Moroccan phone number, so the search works as well from Lyon or Leeds as from Casablanca; your browser can translate the menus if French is not easy for you.
How to run it as the remote member of the family:
Tick off
- Get the names first. Ask your parents to photograph the shop sign, a business card and any document the agency gave them. You need the trade name and the company name; they are often different.
- Open the directory yourself, by typing the ministry's address, not through a link the agency or a group chat sent.
- Search each name, starting with one distinctive word. Look in both lists: ODV and DV2.
- Take a dated screenshot of what you find, or of the empty result.
- Send the screenshot to the family thread, so that your parents have the same record you do.
- Repeat before each payment. A licence can be withdrawn by the Tourism department's regional services2.
If the name does not appear, do not panic and do not accuse. Ask the agency, in writing, for the exact name under which it is listed, then search that name yourself. Until the doubt is cleared, nothing is paid. The full method, with the common reasons for an empty result, is in how to check a Moroccan Umrah agency's licence, and the two licence types are explained in ODV and DV: what Morocco's travel agency licences mean.
Why the search matters even for an agency the whole neighbourhood uses: according to H24info, a Marrakech agency left pilgrims stranded in Turkey after it had failed to renew its licence and was therefore no longer on the official list5. Reputation told those families nothing about the licence on the day they paid.
Questions to send in writing
Questions asked at the counter get answers that are easy to forget and impossible to prove. The same questions sent by message, from you or from your parents' phone, leave a record. A serious agency answers them without difficulty.
Send them in one message, numbered, and ask for numbered answers:
Tick off
- Under what exact company name is the agency listed in the ministry directory, and with which licence type?
- Does the agency organise this Umrah itself, or sell it for another agency? If another, which one, under what name?
- Which hotels, in Makkah and in Madinah, by name, and for which nights?
- Which flights, from which airport, on which dates?
- Who accompanies the group, and how can my parents reach that person on the spot?
- What exactly is included in the price, and what is not?
- What happens if the trip is cancelled or the dates change, by the agency or by my parents?
- What is the total price, how is it paid, to which account, and in whose name is the receipt issued?
Read the answers before your parents sign. If an answer is vague, ask again. If the agency refuses to answer in writing, that refusal is itself information.
Older parents travelling together have needs that a package should spell out: the room, the walking distance, the transfers, the help on site. Reading the package itself, line by line, is a separate task from checking the agency: do it once the agency has passed the checks on this page, with offresomra.ma's guide to buying an Umrah package for your parents.
Contract and receipts: who signs, in whose name?
Decide this before anything is signed, and write the decision down in the family thread. There is no single right answer; there is only a clear one.
- Who signs the contract. The simplest arrangement is that the travellers sign themselves, in person, at the office. If you sign from abroad instead, make sure your parents are named as the travellers on the contract.
- Whose name the agency appears under. The contract and every receipt should carry the agency's company name, the same one you found in the directory. A trade name alone, or a different company, needs a written explanation first.
- Who pays. If you pay by transfer from abroad, send it to the agency's own business account, never to an individual. If your parents pay at the counter, they ask for a dated receipt in the agency's name for every amount, signed or stamped.
- What each receipt says. The amount, the date, what it is for, and the names of the travellers. A receipt that says only “deposit” with no names is weak evidence later.
Then the scans. Ask your parents to photograph every page of the contract, front and back, before they leave the office, and every receipt the day it is issued. Put everything in one shared folder that both you and your parents can open. Keep the paper originals in one envelope at home in Morocco.
More warning signs from published cases, and the check that answers each one, are in Umrah scams in Morocco: warning signs from published cases.
If something goes wrong, from abroad
Distance does not take away your options. The national complaints portal is online: you can file a complaint with the Tourism department, track it with its number and an e-mail address, and reopen it if the answer is unsatisfactory3. The ministry's complaints page, in French, points to it.
The other route needs someone on the ground. Disputes between pilgrims and agencies are first settled amicably through the delegations of the Ministry of Tourism6. Your parents, or a relative in Morocco, can take the file there. Ask the delegation first what it expects if the person attending is not the one who signed.
Your shared folder is what makes either route possible. A complaint with the contract, the receipts and the agency's written answers attached is far stronger than one built from memory. The steps, in order, are in complaint against a Moroccan travel agency: your options.
Check us too
This site belongs to a travel agency, Wiki Tours International, in Casablanca. If your parents are considering it, the routine on this page applies to it word for word: search its name in the directory yourself, send it the eight questions above, and ask for its company name on the contract and receipts.
We do not show any licence details for it on this site yet; they will be published on the publisher page only when they can be linked to an official source. You can read what the agency says about itself on its own site, the Wiki Tours website, and compare it with what you find in the ministry directory.
Still unclear
- What a directory entry shows (address, licence type, date granted): no official source we have read describes it, so compare what you see with your documents.
- Whether a delegation accepts a relative who did not sign the contract, and with which document: ask before anyone goes.
- Whether the person who paid from abroad, but did not sign, can file a complaint in their own name: we have no official source on this, which is why we suggest both names appear on the documents.
- How long a portal complaint takes to be answered: we have found no published figure.
- Whether an English version of the directory or the portal exists: the pages we link to are in French.
What should you do next?
Call your parents, ask for the names on the shop sign and the business card, and run the directory search while you are on the phone together. Then send the questions in one message and wait for written answers before anyone pays. If you want a second pair of eyes on the method, you can write to us; we explain how to check, and we do not judge a named competing agency.