How to read an Egypt day tour itinerary: five signs of a real plan

A real Egypt day tour plan shows five things before you pay: the stops in order from hotel to hotel, the drive time to each stop without traffic, lunch and any shopping stop as stops of their own, a list of what is included and what is not, and clock times marked as approximate. The tour pages on this site are built that way. If a plan you are comparing lacks one of the five, ask for it.

Sign one: the stops come in order, hotel to hotel

A plan starts at your hotel and ends at your hotel, with every stop between them named and in order. Each tour page on Egypt Day Tours (egyptdaytours.net), a site dedicated to day tours in Egypt, shows a map, photos of each stop and the whole day stop by stop. Take Pyramids, Memphis and Saqqara: hotel pickup, the Giza pyramids, the Great Sphinx, the Valley Temple, an optional camel ride at extra cost, lunch at a local restaurant, Saqqara, the Memphis open-air museum, an optional shopping stop, and the return to your hotel. You can see what the day contains, and which parts cost extra.

Sign two: drive time to each stop, without traffic

Distances and drive times tell you how the day is spent. On our pages they come from map routing and are "without traffic", meaning free-flowing roads. Real roads can take longer, which is one reason the pickup time is confirmed at booking. Here are the legs of the Cairo example, from a hotel in Downtown or Zamalek:

The first leg depends on where you sleep. The same tour lists the drive to Giza for three hotel areas: 20 minutes from Downtown or Zamalek, 4 minutes from a hotel in Giza near the pyramids, and 42 minutes from New Cairo. A plan that gives one figure for every hotel is guessing. For the Cairo side of this, read how hotel pickup works for Cairo day tours.

Drive times also show you the long days. On Kom Ombo and Edfu from Aswan the first leg, from your hotel to Edfu, is about 80 minutes without traffic, then 52 minutes on to Kom Ombo and 36 minutes back to Aswan. You know the shape of the day before you book.

Sign three: lunch and shopping are stops of their own

Meals and shopping take part of a day, so they belong in the plan. In the Cairo example, lunch at a local restaurant sits between the pyramids and Saqqara, and the shopping stop comes last and is optional: skip it if you would rather go straight back to your hotel. In the Luxor example, Luxor East and West Banks in one day, an alabaster workshop comes before lunch, and the key facts say the shopping stop is part of the program. Lunch is included on 31 tours and optional, not included, on 7 tours, so the page has to say which. More on this in shopping stops on Egypt day tours.

Sign four: included and not included, named

A real plan lists what the price covers. The Cairo example includes the private air-conditioned vehicle, the hotel pickup and return, a private English Egyptologist guide, the entrance fees to all the mentioned sites, a bottle of water, lunch, and all taxes and service charges. It lists as not included: entry inside the Great Pyramid, which is optional, any extras not in the itinerary, and tipping. The Luxor example names the ticket for Tutankhamun's tomb as not included and optional. Tipping is listed as not included on 86 tours. On the 7 tours that travel by plane, domestic flights are never part of the tour price; each of those pages says so. The whole list, tour by tour, is in what is included in an Egypt day tour.

Sign five: times are approximate, and said to be

Tour pages show approximate clock times. They are estimates: the pickup time is confirmed when you book, because traffic and your hotel's location change it. A plan that gives exact minutes at every site for a day in Cairo traffic is promising what no one can keep.

Using the five signs

Open two plans side by side and look for the five. Where one is missing, send the question to the contact page before you pay; the reply, within an hour at most, comes with the plan for your date. Other questions worth asking are in questions to ask before booking an Egypt day tour.