Most Egypt itineraries pick a lane. This one does not. Over seventeen days you get the pyramid fields at Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur; Greco-Roman Alexandria on the Mediterranean; three nights sailing the Nile between Aswan and Luxor; five nights on the Red Sea; and a night camping in the White Desert with nothing overhead but stars. Six distinct Egypts, in the order that makes sense.
This 17 day Egypt tour package runs as a small group, capped at sixteen travelers, with a licensed Egyptologist guiding throughout. If you would rather travel privately, we can build the same itinerary as a private departure — just ask.
The pacing is deliberate. The first nine days are dense: Giza, the Grand Egyptian Museum, Coptic and Islamic Cairo, Alexandria, Saqqara and Dahshur, then straight onto the river for Philae, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Karnak and the Valley of the Kings. That is a lot of antiquity in a short window, and by day nine most travellers have earned a break. So the Red Sea comes next — five nights of nothing you have to do — before the desert finale.
Egypt Best Vacations is a licensed Egyptian operator, founded and run by a working Egyptologist, and a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice winner three years running. See the rest of our 17 day Egypt vacation packages if you want a different shape to the same length of trip.
Cairo and the north
Giza and the Grand Egyptian Museum, Coptic and Islamic Cairo, a full day in Alexandria, then Saqqara, Memphis and Dahshur. Four guided days and one arrival day.
The Nile
Fly to Aswan, board the ship, and sail north to Luxor: Philae, the High Dam, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Esna Lock, Karnak, Luxor Temple and the Valley of the Kings. Abu Simbel is available as an optional excursion on day 7.
The Red Sea
Drive from Luxor to Hurghada after the west bank tour. Four completely free days on the coast, with diving, snorkelling and desert safaris bookable locally. This is the decompression built into the middle of the trip.
The Western Desert
Fly back to Cairo, then drive out to Bahariya, the Black Desert, Crystal Mountain and the chalk formations of the White Desert. One night under canvas and one of the darkest skies you will ever stand under.
Departure
Breakfast in Cairo, then the airport.
Sixteen nights in total: seven in Cairo, five in Hurghada, three aboard the ship and one in the desert.
Your Egypt Best Vacations representative meets you inside the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport with a signboard and helps you through the visa and passport formalities before your transfer to the hotel. The rest of the day is free to rest and adjust.
Meals Plan: No Meals Included
Your guide collects you after breakfast for the Giza plateau: the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, and the Sphinx carved from the bedrock beside them. Khufu’s pyramid is the only one of the seven ancient wonders still standing. Entering it is available as an optional extra ticket.
After lunch at a local restaurant, continue to the Grand Egyptian Museum, the largest archaeological museum in the world. The complete Tutankhamun collection is here — more than five thousand objects from a single tomb, displayed together for the first time in history.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Begin at the Citadel of Saladin, begun in 1176 to defend Cairo against the Crusaders and expanded by every ruler since. Inside stands the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, known as the Alabaster Mosque for the stone facing its walls and courtyard.
Continue to Coptic Cairo. The Hanging Church is among the oldest Christian churches in Egypt, built above a Roman gatehouse — which is where the name comes from — and known for its wooden ceiling and its icons. Nearby, Abu Serga Church stands over a crypt where tradition holds the Holy Family sheltered during their time in Egypt. End at Ben Ezra Synagogue, where the Cairo Geniza was found: a storeroom of nearly three hundred thousand manuscript fragments that transformed what historians know about medieval Jewish life across the Mediterranean.
Finish the day at Khan El-Khalili, trading here since the fourteenth century — narrow lanes, spice merchants, coppersmiths, and coffee houses that have been serving the same clientele for generations.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
Drive north to the Mediterranean. The Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa are the largest Roman burial complex in Egypt, cut three levels into the rock and holding some three hundred tombs. What makes them remarkable is the mixing: Egyptian gods carved in Roman dress, Greek architecture with pharaonic iconography, all in one tomb.
Continue to Pompey’s Pillar, a single granite column nearly thirty metres tall, raised around 297 AD for the emperor Diocletian — the name is a medieval mistake that stuck. It stands on the site of the Serapeum, the great temple of Serapis, of which almost nothing else survives.
Then the Citadel of Qaitbay, built in 1477 on the foundations of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, using its fallen stone. End at the Library of Alexandria, the modern building raised in tribute to the ancient one. Lunch at a local restaurant, then return to Cairo.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
The day that explains how the pyramids happened. Begin at Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of Djoser — the world’s oldest large-scale stone building, and the first attempt at a pyramid, built in stacked stages because nobody had yet worked out how to do it in one.
Continue to Memphis, Egypt’s first capital, now an open-air museum around the colossal fallen statue of Ramses II. Then Dahshur, where Sneferu built the Bent Pyramid — its angle changes partway up, because the original slope proved unstable — and then got it right with the Red Pyramid, the first true smooth-sided pyramid ever completed. Giza follows directly from this. Seeing the three sites in one day makes that lineage obvious.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
Transfer to Cairo Airport for the flight to Aswan. Your representative meets you inside the arrivals hall and your guide begins the Aswan tour.
Visit the High Dam, the 1960s project that ended the Nile’s annual flood and created Lake Nasser behind it. Then by motorboat to the Temple of Isis, which stood on Philae Island until the water rose — it was cut into more than forty thousand pieces and rebuilt on neighbouring Agilkia Island, reshaped to match the original. It was among the last working temples of the ancient Egyptian religion, still in use into the sixth century AD.
End at the Unfinished Obelisk, still lying in its granite quarry, abandoned when it cracked. It is the single most informative thing in Egypt about how obelisks were actually cut. Board your ship. Overnight in Aswan.
Optional tour: Tour to the Nubian Village in Aswan
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
A free morning aboard, or the optional excursion to Abu Simbel — three hours south by road, and for many travellers the single most impressive site in Egypt.
The ship sails around midday. Disembark at Kom Ombo, where the temple sits directly above the river on an unusual double plan: two mirrored halves, one for Sobek the crocodile god and one for Haroeris, Horus the Elder. Begun under Ptolemy VI and added to for some four centuries afterwards, into the Roman period. Visit the Crocodile Museum alongside, where mummified crocodiles from the surrounding area are displayed. Sail on to Edfu.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Take a horse carriage from the mooring to the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Built between 237 and 57 BC under the Ptolemies, it is the most completely preserved temple in Egypt — roof intact, walls inscribed inside and out, including the fullest surviving account of a temple’s own rituals. Sand buried it for centuries, which is exactly why it survived.
Back aboard and north to Luxor, transiting the Esna Lock on the way. On arrival, visit Karnak — the largest religious complex ever built, around a hundred hectares, raised and rebuilt across roughly two thousand years. Continue to Luxor Temple, built mainly by Amenhotep III and Ramses II and joined to Karnak by the avenue of sphinxes. Both were dedicated to the Theban triad: Amun, Mut and Khonsu. Overnight in Luxor.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Disembark after breakfast and cross to the west bank. In the Valley of the Kings the New Kingdom pharaohs abandoned pyramids and cut their tombs deep into the rock instead, hoping obscurity would do what monumental scale had not. The ancient name for the place was Ta-Iset-Maat, the Place of Truth. More than sixty tombs and chambers have been found; your ticket covers three, and your guide will choose the best of those open on the day.
Continue to the terraced temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. Hatshepsut ruled as senior co-ruler alongside her stepson Thutmose III for around twenty-two years — a documented partnership, not the sole reign she is often credited with. Finish at the Colossi of Memnon, all that stands above ground of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple.
Then the drive east to Hurghada, roughly four hours across the Eastern Desert, arriving at your all-inclusive resort in time for dinner.
Optional tour: Sunrise Hot Air Balloon over Luxor
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Nine days of antiquity is a lot, and this is where the trip changes gear. The reef starts close to shore here, so the easiest first day is a mask and a short swim. If you want to go further out, the boat trips to the coral gardens around Giftun Island leave in the morning and return mid-afternoon. Your representative can book any of the Hurghada day tours locally.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (all-inclusive)
The Red Sea is one of the world’s great dive destinations, and Hurghada runs introductory dives for people who have never breathed underwater as well as guided dives on the wrecks and walls for certified divers. If you would rather stay dry, the quad and jeep safaris head into the Eastern Desert in the afternoon and finish with a Bedouin dinner under the stars.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (all-inclusive)
Glass-bottom boats and the submarine trip both put you over the reef without swimming — good for families, non-swimmers and anyone who has had enough sun. Alternatively, El Gouna is twenty minutes up the coast: a purpose-built lagoon town with a marina, restaurants and a very different feel to Hurghada itself.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (all-inclusive)
Nothing scheduled. Repeat whichever of the last three days you liked most, or spend it entirely on a sunbed. Tomorrow the trip picks up again, and the desert leg is an early start.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (all-inclusive)
Transfer to Hurghada Airport for the flight to Cairo and your hotel. The evening is free — an early night before the desert.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
Leave Cairo early and drive southwest to the Bahariya Oasis. After lunch, transfer to 4×4 and head into the Black Desert, its hills darkened by volcanic dolerite, then the cold springs at Hez, then Crystal Mountain — a ridge of quartz that catches the light. Continue to Aqabat, the most dramatic stretch of the White Desert National Park, and finally to camp among the chalk formations, wind-carved into mushrooms, towers and animals over millennia.
Dinner is cooked at camp. Afterwards there is nothing to do but look up. This is one of the darkest skies in Egypt and the Milky Way is plainly visible.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Wake for sunrise over the white formations — the light at dawn is the reason people come out here. Breakfast at camp, then 4×4 back to Bahariya and the drive to Cairo for your final night.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
Breakfast at the hotel, then your transfer to Cairo International Airport. Seventeen days is long enough to have seen the country properly, and short enough to leave things undone — Siwa, Sinai, Lake Nasser. Come back for those. See our other Egypt tour packages whenever you are ready.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
| Season | Dates | Triple | Twin | Single |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 1 May – 30 Sep | $2,350 | $2,510 | $4,270 |
| High | 1 Oct – 10 Dec | $2,510 | $2,750 | $4,675 |
| Festive | 11 Dec – 10 Jan | $3,140 | $3,440 | $5,850 |
| High | 11 Jan – 25 Mar | $2,510 | $2,750 | $4,675 |
| Easter | 26 Mar – 10 Apr | $2,900 | $3,100 | $5,270 |
| Shadow | 11 Apr – 30 Apr | $2,450 | $2,700 | $4,590 |
Cairo Hotels: Safir Hotel. Sonesta Hotel. Ramses Hilton. Holiday Inn Citystars. Cairo Pyramids Hotels. Tolips Gardens Hotel or similar category
Nile Cruises: MS Ruby. MS Nile Dolphin. MS Princess Sarah. MS Nile Carinval. MS Semiramis. MS A Sarah or similar category.
Hurghada Hotels: Titanic Beach Resort. Pharaoh Azur Resort. Hurghada Marriott Beach Resort. Rewaya Inn Resort and more of similar category
| Season | Dates | Triple | Twin | Single |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 1 May – 30 Sep | $2,830 | $2,990 | $5,085 |
| High | 1 Oct – 10 Dec | $2,990 | $3,300 | $5,610 |
| Festive | 11 Dec – 10 Jan | $3,740 | $4,125 | $7,015 |
| High | 11 Jan – 25 Mar | $2,990 | $3,300 | $5,610 |
| Easter | 26 Mar – 10 Apr | $3,500 | $3,900 | $6,630 |
| Shadow | 11 Apr – 30 Apr | $2,940 | $3,250 | $5,525 |
