Awesome 10 day trip; perfectly organized - Awesome 10-day trip arranged by Marsa Alam Tours: 3 days Cairo, Aswan & Abu Simbel, Nile cruise, 3 days Luxor and 2 days White Desert. Good hotels, guides and drivers. Every day contact with owner Ahmed (who speaks excellent Dutch) to ask if everything is still ok. Good contact via whatsapp to inform about which drivers/guides and at what time & where to meet. Sometimes their respons times on questions in the period before starting the trip were a little long 9but could be due to the extreme busy "after-covid" period around christmas/newyear. Rebooking of hotels (due to double bookings) where perfectly handled by offering even better hotels. Small adaptations during our trip (like we would no guide only driver on some days) were easily complied with. Thank you so much for this wonderfulp trip!

Great trip, but only if you speak english - Amazing trip, and amazing the visit to the white desert, don't miss that one. The only problem: when you book, be careful if you ask for guides in a language diferent than english, because they might say "yes, of course" but later you will find out that half of the guides only speak english.

Well priced and beautiful Egypt trip but some lack of coordination - After looking at many tour options and itineraries we chose Marsa Alam Tours because it was well priced and had a trip to the white desert included in a 10 day Tour of Egypt and customizable. We traveled with my 75 year old mother and my 8 year old son. Wael was a huge help from the very beginning, communicating on what’s app and even having conversations. They were able to provide a transfer to Hurgurda for us even though we booked our own hotel and airport transfers which was really nice. Wael continued to be very communicative throughout the trip and extremely responsive and available 27x7. However the reason for the 3 star review is that I really had to do a lot of the coordination work myself with him and Ahmed. We didn’t know who would pick us or at what time up until usually the night before or the day of. Each individual component/excursion was as described and really good, however what was lacking was the coordination to link it all together to create a smooth itinerary. Let me break it down by city as we went to Cairo, White Desert, Nile Cruise, and Luxor, both positive and negative aspects: Cairo - Le Meridian Hotel - exceptional 5* hotel. We loved this hotel and is connected to the airport. Wael & Ahmed even helped us organize an additional afternoon there before a late night with a reduced rate than we could have gotten ourselves. Radisson Hotel - Excellent 5* hotel, great breakfast. We stayed one night and then had to move hotels to Le Meridian in a 2 day trip to Cairo. Upon arrival at 1am the hotel only had one room booked for us instead of 2 rooms. We had to give the driver exact USD to be given to the hotel to secure the room at a reduced rate. We would have much more appreciated staying in one hotel both nights rather than packing up our stuff after being at the hotel for 6 hours and driving with our stuff all around Cairo. Guide - Adam our guide for the Pyramids and Museum was excellent. Clear english, knowledgeable and the best guide we had by far. White Desert - This started out quite sketchy as we were picked up in a run down mini van type car where we packed all our luggage and the four of us into and were supposed to have all private tours. On this first trip they wanted to put in another passenger and his luggage with us which clearly didn’t fit for a 4+hr car journey. The driver wanted to strap our luggage to the roof which was not acceptable. I had to get on the phone (one time out of many) with the manager and tell him it’s not happening, that there was no room. Meanwhile we see other tours in a nice 8 passenger big maxi van. The Desert was however one of the highlights of the trip. It’s incredible scenery and beautiful and sleep beneath the stars, but it’s not private as you’re with other groups (which is fine and you meet other people) The food is great and each stop was more spectacular than the next. I did expect we would have a guide on this part of the trip but we only had drivers that didn’t really speak good English therefore we didn’t really have much background information on the area. Aswan - We flew into Aswan very late arriving at 1am. The evening before we were told that we’d have to get up at 5am if we wanted to do Abu Simbel (which was included in the itinerary and one of the reasons we chose this itinerary). That left us 3hrs of sleep with an 8year old and the drive to Abu Simbel was 3hrs round trip and we needed to make this time to get the Nile Cruise. This was unrealistic and underestimated cramming of activities into one day. On this day we were supposed to do Abu Simbel, all the Aswan sights plus the Nubian village and boat tour. In the end we choose to skip Abu Simbel and do the Nubian village and all the Aswan sights and we were touring from 9am - 7pm! Our Numbian Guide was a lovely man who took us to his parents house and village. He didn’t speak much english so we didn’t really have any information about the village aside from reading about it. Our Guide in Aswan sights was very good, informative and good English. However she tried to talk us going to see the Obelisk because we were short on time, but it was an included part of our tour and we already gave up Abu Simbel so we insisted. Our guide Tamir in Edfu and Kom Obo was the only guide that directly engaged with our son and made it fun for him. We liked him a lot, his English was OK. Hotel was Basha which the grounds were nice but the rooms were dated. The driver at Aswan airport we couldn’t find because they don’t hold up a sign with our names on it and had someone else’s passport photos so didn’t even know who he was looking for and who we were looking for. The drivers that took us to the Cruise also didn’t have a sign, didn’t come into the lobby or anything to look for us and we were sitting there for 30 min. All this type of miscommunication could easily be avoided if we knew who are driver was beforehand and if they have signs with our names on it. Luxor: We had the same guide for two days, Mohammed who was really nice and tried very hard but we simply couldn’t understand him, which made understanding the history challenging and there was so much to know in Luxor. This was very unfortunate. Unfortunately the additional balloon rides were cancelled due to wind, and the Sound and Light Show that we were supposed to do was cancelled as there was a party that night. Had we known before we couldn’t do the Sights & sounds at Cairo we probably would have opted to go in Luxor, but we didn’t find out until the afternoon of the same day. They also took us to a few “tourist trap” places where we felt a bit obligated to buy something, which i always hope to avoid if i’m already paying for the tours. All in all we had a great time but it was unnecessarily stressful and felt chaotic at times. If I hadn’t bought a roaming plan for my phone to be able to communicate with Wael i don’t know how a lot of the coordination would have happened.