Four days is not long. What makes this one work is that it does not try to cover Egypt — it covers two cities properly, from a single hotel, with a private guide and no internal flights to eat half a day each.
Day two is Giza and the Grand Egyptian Museum, which sit two kilometres apart. Day three is Alexandria on the Mediterranean, three hours north and a different country in every way that matters. Day four is the Citadel of Saladin and Coptic Cairo before your flight out.
Private throughout: your own Egyptologist, your own vehicle, your own pace. Nothing is shared and nothing runs to a group’s schedule.
You choose between two hotel tiers, Diamond and Elite. We publish the Egyptian licence and the honest Western equivalent for both, because the two are not the same number.
Egypt Best Vacations is a three consecutive TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Awards — 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Arrive at Cairo International Airport, where our representative meets you inside the terminal with an Egypt Best Vacations signboard and helps you through passport and visa formalities. Private transfer to your hotel, where all three nights of this tour are spent — you unpack once. Dinner at the hotel.
Meals Plan: Dinner Only
Your guide collects you from the hotel by private vehicle.
The Giza Plateau first, while the light is good and the crowds are thinner. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world; Khafre’s still carries its casing stones at the apex, which is the clearest surviving evidence of what all three originally looked like. Then Menkaure, the smallest of the three, and the Sphinx with its Valley Temple below the causeway.
You can go inside the Great Pyramid — it needs a separate ticket, and the ascent through the Grand Gallery is steep, hot and unventilated. On a private tour your guide can simply wait, which is one of the practical advantages of not travelling with a group.
Lunch at a local restaurant, then the Grand Egyptian Museum, two kilometres away. It is the largest archaeological museum in the world built for a single civilisation, and its centrepiece is the complete Tutankhamun collection — all of it, together, for the first time since the tomb was cleared. The Grand Staircase alone holds statuary spanning three thousand years, arranged so you climb through Egyptian history on your way up.
The museum takes longer than anyone plans for. Because this tour is private, your guide paces the morning around that rather than around a coach departure.
Back to the hotel. Dinner.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Early start north to the Mediterranean, roughly three hours each way by private vehicle. It is a long day and it is the reason this itinerary is four days rather than three.
Alexandria was Greek and then Roman before it was Arab, and it never quite stopped being both. Alexander founded it, the Ptolemies ruled Egypt from it, and for centuries it was the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean rather than an Egyptian provincial city.
The Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa descend three storeys into the rock and are the strangest thing in the country. Cut in the second century AD, it began as a private family tomb and grew into a public cemetery holding several hundred burials. What makes it remarkable is the carving: Egyptian gods in Roman armour and Greek drapery, made by people who no longer entirely knew which religion they belonged to.
Then Pompey’s Pillar, which has nothing to do with Pompey — a Roman victory column raised for Diocletian in AD 297. It stands on the mound that held the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis and, later, the Serapeum, the temple of Osiris-Serapis that once housed part of the ancient library’s collection. Almost nothing of it survives but the column.
The Qaitbay Citadel occupies the harbour point, built in 1477 by the Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qaitbay against a rising Ottoman naval threat — and built on the exact site of the Pharos lighthouse, partly from its fallen stone. The lighthouse stood for roughly seventeen centuries before earthquakes brought it down; the fort is what Egypt made from the pieces.
Lunch at a restaurant on the Corniche, then finish at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the modern library opened in 2002 near where the ancient one is thought to have stood.
Return to Cairo. Dinner at the hotel.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Breakfast, then up to the Citadel of Saladin, begun in 1176 on the Muqattam spur to defend the city against the Crusaders. It remained the seat of Egyptian government for some seven hundred years. Inside it, the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali — Ottoman in plan, closer to Istanbul than to Cairo, and the building that gives the skyline its silhouette from almost anywhere in the city.
Lunch, then down to Coptic Cairo, inside the walls of the Roman fortress of Babylon. The Hanging Church is suspended over the fortress gatehouse — the reason for its name, and visible through a glass panel in the floor. Abu Serga, the Church of St Sergius, stands over the crypt where tradition places the Holy Family during their flight into Egypt.
Private transfer to Cairo Airport for your departure.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
