Egypt Best Vacations’ private Karnak and Luxor Temple tour covers Luxor’s East Bank in 3–4 hours, from $40 per person, with hotel or Nile cruise ship pickup, both entrance fees, and a licensed Egyptologist guide. Two temples, joined by a processional avenue and by two thousand years of building: Karnak, the largest temple complex ever raised, and Luxor Temple in the middle of the modern city, where worship has never actually stopped.
This is our best-value tour and the easiest half-day in Luxor — no river crossing, no long drive, both sites within a few kilometres of each other. Book it for the afternoon and you finish at Luxor Temple as the floodlights come on, which is the single most photographed hour in the city. Egypt Best Vacations is based in Luxor and your guide is a working Egyptologist, which matters at Karnak more than almost anywhere: without one you walk through an overwhelming accumulation of stone wondering who built what. As a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Award winner for 2024, 2025 and 2026, we run every departure privately, at your own pace.
Want the West Bank too? Our full day tour of both banks covers the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut and the Colossi as well. Browse all our Luxor day tours to compare.
Times below are for our recommended afternoon departure. A morning version running 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM is available every day at no difference in price — tell us which you prefer.
3:00 PM: Your Egyptologist meets you in your hotel lobby in Luxor, or at your Nile cruise ship’s gangway. Both temples sit on the East Bank within a few kilometres of each other, so there is no river crossing and very little driving.
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM — Karnak Temple: An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes brings you to the First Pylon, and from there Karnak opens out into something closer to a walled city of temples than a single building — roughly a hundred hectares of precincts, pylons, obelisks and a sacred lake, the largest temple complex ever built. Work began under Senusret I around 1971 BC and carried on for close to two thousand years, with every major pharaoh from the Middle Kingdom through to the Ptolemies adding something and often demolishing a predecessor’s work to do it.
The Great Hypostyle Hall holds 134 columns, the tallest twenty-one metres, and remains the largest room of any religious building anywhere. The main precinct belongs to Amun-Ra, with smaller precincts for his consort Mut and their son Khonsu. Your Egyptologist unpicks the chronology as you walk: who built what, who erased whom, and why they all wanted their name on this particular stone.
5:15 PM – 6:30 PM — Luxor Temple: Colossal seated statues of Ramesses II flank the entrance, alongside a single standing obelisk — its twin has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since 1836. Inside, Amenhotep III’s court and the Colonnade Hall carry reliefs of the Opet Festival carved under Tutankhamun: the procession that carried Amun’s statue here from Karnak each year to renew the king’s authority. Further in, look for the chamber Alexander the Great converted into a barque shrine, and the Roman chamber painted for the imperial cult. Above all of it stands the mosque of Abu el-Haggag, built when the temple lay buried to the shoulders in sand and still in use today — three thousand years of continuous worship on one site, which almost nowhere else in the world can show you. On an afternoon departure you are here as the light goes and the floodlights come up.
6:00 PM: Your tour ends with a transfer back to your hotel or cruise ship.
