Your Rawdah appointment: what happens on the day
You have the permit. This is the part the other guides skip — the two hours from leaving your hotel to walking back out, and the handful of avoidable ways people lose an appointment they already hold.
There are two clocks, not one
Your appointment time is when you are expected at the Rawdah entrance, not when you should leave the hotel. Guidance is to be inside the Haram premises around thirty minutes before the slot, and at the entrance around fifteen minutes before it.
Arriving at the appointment time is arriving late. The Prophet’s Mosque is very large, the security check has a queue, and the walk from the outer courtyard to the right gate is longer than it looks on a map. Budget the thirty minutes as walking time, not as waiting time.
What you must have with you
The barcode. Not the confirmation email, not a photograph of the booking summary — the barcode itself, which is scanned at the gate. Entry is refused without it.
Have it available offline. Reception inside a crowded courtyard is unreliable, and the moment you need to show it is exactly the moment the page will not load. Screenshot it, or use a pass that stores itself on the phone.
Your passport, or the identity document the permit was issued against.
At the gate
The barcode is scanned and checked against the appointment. Two things get people turned away here: arriving in the wrong time band, and arriving at a gate for the other gender’s allocation. Both are discovered at the scanner, and neither can be fixed on the spot.
If you are with family, you separate before this point. Men and women are directed to different gates and different time bands, so agree where to meet afterwards while you can still talk to each other.
The ten minutes
You have about ten minutes inside, in a dense and continuously moving crowd, with staff keeping the flow going. Nobody gets to linger, and being asked to move on is not a reflection on you.
Decide in advance what you intend to pray and in what order. Ten minutes covers what you prepared and does not cover what you improvise. People who plan the sequence beforehand come out satisfied; people who plan to decide once inside generally do not.
If something goes wrong
If you know in advance you cannot attend, cancel in Nusuk. This is the single most consequential thing on this page: a permit you hold and silently do not use can block you from booking again for a full year, whereas a cancelled one does not.
If you are running late, go anyway — the band has some width and a scanner does not know your intentions. If you have already missed the window entirely, cancelling afterwards does not undo it, but it is still worth doing.
If the barcode will not scan, staff at the gate can look the appointment up. This takes time you will not have if you arrived at your appointment time rather than before it.
For agencies
Most of the failures above are information failures, not booking failures: the pilgrim had a valid appointment and lost it to a wrong assumption about the clock or the gate. That is why the pass RawdahPass issues carries the time, the gate and the barcode on one page that works without signal, in the pilgrim’s own language.
The booking is the part software can do. Getting forty people to the right gate at the right moment is the part that still depends on telling them clearly.
Frequently asked
How early should I arrive for my Rawdah appointment?
Be inside the Haram premises around thirty minutes before your slot and at the Rawdah entrance around fifteen minutes before it. Arriving at the appointment time itself is arriving late.
What do I need to bring to the Rawdah?
The barcode from your Nusuk permit, available offline, and the passport the permit was issued against. The barcode is scanned at the gate and there is no entry without it.
How long do you get inside the Rawdah?
About ten minutes, in a moving crowd directed by staff. Plan what you intend to pray before you go in.
What happens if I am late for my Rawdah appointment?
Go anyway if you are only slightly late — the time band has some width. If you know beforehand that you cannot attend, cancel in Nusuk: failing to cancel can block you from booking again for a year.
Can my family and I enter the Rawdah together?
No. Men and women are allocated different time bands and enter through different gates, so agree a meeting point beforehand.