5.0 on Tripadvisor Licensed by the Ministry of Tourism and AntiquitiesMinistry licensed guides On the river since 2011 Luxor and Aswan, every week
Nile Cruising did not start as a company. It started as a group of licensed guides in Luxor who kept ending up on the same quay, with the same complaints about how visitors were being handled, and eventually decided to do it their own way.
What we want for tourism here is simple. Egypt is not short of monuments, it is short of people explaining them honestly. Every group that goes home understanding what it saw brings the next group, and that is what this work is for. It is also why we would rather lose a booking than put you on a ship that is wrong for you.
This page is the long version. If you only want to know who we are and how we work, the about page says it in a minute.
We work as a group, and that is the part most travellers never see. We cover the same river, we cover for each other, and between us there is someone on the water almost every week of the season.
It means that if one of us is already out with a group the morning you land, another of us meets you, with the same programme and the same standard. It means your question gets an answer the same day, from whoever is not inside a tomb at that moment. And it means that when something goes wrong at the quay at six in the morning, there is a guide in Luxor and a guide in Aswan who can be there.
Every one of us is licensed, and every one of us has years of this work behind them. We put it together this way on purpose. Egypt is better served by guides who cooperate than by guides who undercut each other.
This photo is about seven years old. A few of us, licences still new, sitting together after work and arguing about what tourism in Egypt should look like and who it should be for.
Most of that talk stayed talk. One of us went and built something out of it and asked the others to come in. That is where Nile Cruising comes from: not an investor and a marketing plan, but a group of guides who wanted the work done properly.
Mahmoud, Mohamed and Mostafa, on the river.Nobody learns this job from a book. Three people made us the guides we are (the older brother, the ideal, and the one who never let anything pass).
One taught the work itself, step by step, and never allowed a shortcut. One never let a mistake go by without saying it to our faces, which is rarer than praise and worth more. And one, who runs the agency we grew up working with, gave us the chance to start at all, and still sets the standard we measure a business against.
He is the one missing from the boat photograph above. He grew up in Luxor, started guiding on the ships at 21, and stayed in the work for more than twenty years.
He kept the old manners of the profession: you explain, you do not sell, and the people with you are guests before they are clients. He died a year ago, and he is still the guide the rest of us measure ourselves against.
A cruise is not only the ship. Between the airport, the temples and the quay you spend real hours on the road, and who is driving matters more than people expect. The drivers we work with are professionals licensed for tourist transport, and they know the roads, the checkpoints, and how long the run between two sites actually takes rather than how long it should take.
The vehicles we use are recent models and air conditioned, which on a West Bank afternoon is not a small thing.
Talat runs the drivers, and he often takes the wheel himself. One of our guests started calling him Mr Happy, because he meets everybody with the same smile whatever the hour, and the name stuck with the rest of us.
Talat, head of our drivers (Mr Happy).Tell us the week you are thinking of, and we will tell you honestly what is worth sailing on it.