What is included in an Egypt day tour, and what is not

Our day tours include the hotel pickup and return, a private car and guide for your group and, on 53 tours, the entrance fees to the sites in the program; 72 tours include bottled water and 30 tours include lunch. They leave out domestic flights, tips and the optional extras, such as going inside the Great Pyramid. Each tour page lists both, item by item.

The included and not included lists, counted

Egypt Day Tours (egyptdaytours.net) is a site dedicated to day tours in Egypt. Each of its 73 day tours shows the whole day stop by stop, hotel to hotel, with what is included and what is not. The table counts what those lists say.

The guide-only bookings in Cairo, Luxor, Aswan and Alexandria are not tours: they include a licensed guide for the hours you book, the car and driver and the entrance fees are added on request, and lunch and tips are not included. See a guide only in Cairo.

Entrance fees: the sites in the program

"Entrance fees" means the tickets for the stops a tour lists, not every ticket sold at a site. Three examples from the tour pages:

• The Luxor West Bank tour includes the entrance fees to its archaeological sites, but tickets to special tombs in the Valley of the Kings, such as Tutankhamun's, Seti I's or Ramses VI's, and camera tickets inside the tombs are not included.
• The Cairo day by plane from Hurghada includes the entrance to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where the Tutankhamun galleries are; going inside the Great Pyramid is optional and not included.
• On the Karnak sound and light show, the entry ticket to the show is included.

The Valley of the Kings tickets are covered in our Valley of the Kings guide.

Meals

The Giftun Island snorkeling day serves an open buffet lunch on board, and the full-day Cairo tours that start at the Giza pyramids include lunch at a local restaurant. In Cairo, the Egyptian cooking class includes the class and the meal you make, and the Cairo street food tour includes the food tastings on the walk. On the El Alamein and Wadi El Natrun days from Alexandria, lunch is optional and not included. Evening tours can include dinner instead: the pyramids sound and light show, the Maxim dinner cruise on the Nile in Cairo, and the desert safaris from Hurghada and Marsa Alam, which include a barbecue dinner. Several tours list beverages during meals as not included.

Flights, tips and extras

Domestic flights are never part of a tour price. Of the 7 tours that travel by plane, five fly from the Red Sea resorts to Cairo or Luxor, one flies from Luxor to Cairo and one from Cairo to Luxor; on all of them the flight tickets are not included, while the transfers, the guide, the entrance fees and lunch are. The flights follow the airline's own rules; the details are in our guide to day trips by plane.

Tips are listed as not included on 71 tours. Optional extras cost more and are listed outside the price: going inside the Great Pyramid, the Tutankhamun tomb ticket, the camel ride at Giza on the Pyramids, Memphis and Saqqara tour, and the quad bike ride around the Bedouin village on the Hurghada desert safari. 5 tours have an optional shopping stop that you can skip.

Check one tour before you book

Read the tour page's Included and Not included lists before you send a request. If an item you care about is on neither list, ask through the contact page; the reply to a request gives the price for that date and the plan for the day, and no payment is taken with the request.

Paying for what is included

A booking is confirmed with a 25% deposit paid online, by card or PayPal; the rest is paid in cash on the day of the tour. Cancellation is free up to 24 hours before the tour starts, with a full refund; less than 24 hours before, or a no-show, there is no refund. If we cancel a tour, the refund is full. How the price itself works is in how our prices work, and the Cairo tours are on the Cairo page.