The questions we get on the day before a booking gets confirmed.

Short answer, yes. The places British tourists actually go – Cairo and Giza, the Nile Valley, the Red Sea coast – are open, running normally, and don't appear on any FCDO advisory against travel. Security at the temples and museums is unmistakable rather than hidden, which most clients say they prefer.

The areas the FCDO advises against are specific and narrow: the North Sinai border zone and the Libyan frontier. We don't operate anywhere near either, and never have. Our offices – Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Hurghada, Marsa Alam, Sharm El Sheikh – mean someone on our staff is on the ground in every region your trip touches, monitoring conditions in real time. In practical day-to-day terms, the Nile Valley feels closer to a well-run Mediterranean destination than to the news cycle's version of it.

Yes – every British passport needs an Egypt visa. The cheapest way is the official e-Visa at visa2egypt.gov.eg, which costs around £25 and takes three to five working days. If you'd rather not deal with the form, we arrange a visa-on-arrival for around £30 – your stamp is waiting at immigration when you land, so you walk straight through. Your passport has to be valid at least six months beyond your entry date.

Every confirmed booking from us comes with a walk-through PDF on the e-Visa process, screenshots and all. If you opt for our arrival service, our team has the visa ready by immigration before you've collected your bag. One thing worth flagging: if you're only flying into Sharm El-Sheikh and staying in South Sinai, there's a separate free 14-day entry stamp on arrival – but it doesn't cover Cairo or the Nile Valley, so most clients still need the e-Visa even on a Red Sea trip if they plan a day out.

For a 10-day private trip with a 5-night Nile cruise – Cairo, Luxor and Aswan – expect to land between £2,100 and £3,800 per person, depending entirely on which hotels and which ship. The 8-day version starts around £1,690 pp on a budget-conscious build. The properly luxury end – 5★ everywhere, ultra-deluxe ship – starts around £4,200 pp.

All of those are ground-only. Flights from Heathrow, Gatwick or Manchester sit on top – EgyptAir flies LHR–Cairo direct in about five hours; one-stop options via Istanbul, Doha or Frankfurt are often £100–£200 cheaper. Peak season runs October to March and is 15–20% above the April–June shoulder. Group bookings shave a meaningful amount per head. When we quote you, we send all four accommodation tiers in one document so you can see what the next step up actually buys.

October through April. The Nile Valley sits in the 21–29°C range, the sky is clear most days, and the light for photography is unusually good. November to February is the busiest stretch – book early because the Nile ships fill quickly. March and April are the sweet spot if you like fewer coach groups, with weather that's still very close to ideal.

October half-term, February half-term and the Easter holidays are our peak UK weeks – we're already taking bookings a year out for those. July and August in Luxor and Aswan get to 40–46°C, which is doable with 6am starts but not what you'd call enjoyable. The Red Sea works year-round because of how the resorts are built, so a few days on the coast at the end of a Nile trip is a good all-weather hedge if you're worried about the heat.

Eight days – seven nights – is the sweet spot for a first trip. Three nights in Cairo and four on a Nile cruise gets you the Pyramids, the Grand Egyptian Museum, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and Aswan without feeling like you're sprinting. Add Alexandria and it's ten. Add the Red Sea and you're at twelve. Both, and you're doing the full fifteen-day Egypt-to-Mediterranean arc.

If your holiday window stretches, twelve to fifteen days is what we recommend most often. The flight is long, and a couple of nights on the Red Sea after the temples means you fly home rested rather than ragged. Every route we run is modular, so adding days is straightforward and doesn't usually cost as much as you'd guess. We won't take a booking under eight days for a first-time visitor – at seven the flight starts to dominate the experience and you'd come away feeling short-changed.

Honestly, yes. It opened fully in 2026 and is the largest archaeological museum ever built. It's the first place in history to display Tutankhamun's complete tomb hoard – all 5,398 objects – together in one space, alongside another 100,000-odd artefacts spanning seven thousand years. It's walking distance from the Pyramids of Giza, so one good morning covers both.

Every holiday we sell in 2026 includes a half-day private guided GEM visit. Three to four hours is the minimum we'd allocate – the Tutankhamun galleries alone are an hour, and the Grand Staircase with Ramesses II's colossus at the top is genuinely one of the most photographed museum spaces in the world right now. The old Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square hasn't closed – different collection, still excellent, and several of our clients visit both. We pre-book skip-the-queue entry and time the arrival to avoid the coach surge.

Yes, absolutely. Get a policy that includes proper trip cancellation cover, emergency medical, and – most importantly – medical evacuation. The NHS doesn't extend abroad outside reciprocal arrangements, and Egypt isn't on the GHIC scheme. A medical evacuation back to the UK without insurance can run to £40,000 plus.

Read the small print and look specifically for 'medical evacuation' as a line item, not just 'emergency medical' – those are different things. Cairo has perfectly good private hospitals if you need one (Saudi German Hospital and As-Salam come up often), but the evacuation line is what gives you full options if something serious happens. We send insurance guidance with every confirmed booking. Post Office, Saga, Allianz Direct and Staysure are reasonable UK starting points to compare, though we don't earn anything by recommending them.

Tipping is a real part of the Egyptian tourism economy – these aren't service-charge salaries on top of a regular wage. As a working figure: £8–£12 per traveller per day for a private Egyptologist guide, and £4–£6 per day for a driver. On a Nile ship, plan £4–£8 per day to share across the crew. None of this is included in your tour price; it goes straight from your hand to theirs.

We send a detailed tipping schedule with every confirmed booking, sized to your group and itinerary so you can take the right notes out of an ATM at Cairo airport. The one rule worth observing: hand the tip directly to the person, in cash, at the end of the day. Pounds, dollars, euros and Egyptian pounds are all fine. Avoid envelope-pooling systems where you give a lump sum at reception – it rarely reaches the staff it was meant for.

No – don't drink it. Use sealed bottled water for drinking, for brushing your teeth, and for ice in drinks. Bottled water is cheap, available everywhere, and we include it on every tour and every cruise as standard.

This is the single most common avoidable issue for first-time visitors. The guides carry sealed bottles on every excursion. Your hotel room is restocked daily on our programme. Ice in the major Cairo hotels is generally made with filtered water, but at smaller venues the picture's less reliable, so the working rule is just: stick to bottled. If you ever run out, ask the guide – they always have spares.

We're a Class-A licensed Egyptian travel specialist and destination management company, set up in Cairo in 1988 and run by the same family since. Offices across the country – Cairo HQ plus Luxor, Aswan, Hurghada, Marsa Alam, Sharm El Sheikh – and over 10,000 travellers passed through the door in those 38 years. IATA-accredited (#90255546), Egyptian Travel Agents Association member (#718). Every trip we sell is run by our own staff; we don't resell anyone else's programme.

We build and run tailor-made Egypt holidays end-to-end: multi-day private tours, Nile cruises, dahabiya charters, Lake Nasser sailings, day tours, hotels, attraction tickets, airport transfers – whichever combination you need. There's also a B2B arm at dmcegypt.com that serves UK and European travel agents wholesale. Whether you book one component or the whole holiday, it's the same Cairo team. On ATOL: ground-only holidays are invoiced direct by our Cairo office; flight-inclusive packages route through our UK partner agency and follow that agency's ATOL or ABTA cover – explicitly stated on every quote.

A 'Nile cruise' is just the river bit – three, four or seven nights on a 5★ ship or a traditional dahabiya between Luxor and Aswan. A 'Nile cruise package' is a complete Egypt holiday with the river segment in the middle: Cairo and Giza before, the cruise, and the internal flights, hotels, transfers, guides and admissions all bundled into one price. Most UK first-timers want the package – booking just the cruise skips the Pyramids, which is rarely what people had in mind.

On the books we have 60-plus Nile cruise packages and 103 dedicated ships, plus 40 dahabiyas. The package format is what you want if you're new to Egypt – one booking, one invoice, one team coordinating it all. The cruise-only format suits people who've been to Egypt before, or who want to slot our cruise in between their own land arrangements.

Yes, any single component is bookable on its own. We have 67 hotels on the books (3★ all the way to 5★ deluxe, every region), 27 airport transfer routes, 87 day tours across six cities, and 90 attraction tickets. You can mix and match in whatever combination – one hotel plus a transfer, or a single excursion day, or two weeks of stitched-together pieces. There's no minimum.

Single-component bookings are most common with returning Egypt visitors, business travellers extending a Cairo trip, expat residents arranging family arrivals, and people stopping in Egypt as part of a wider Middle East or Mediterranean itinerary. The booking process is the same as for a full holiday – form, WhatsApp or phone – and confirmation usually lands within a working day.