Egypt Best Vacations’ private Luxor full day tour covers the West and East Banks in 8–10 hours, from $90 per person, with hotel or Nile cruise ship pickup, all entrance fees, lunch at a local restaurant, and a licensed Egyptologist guide. Five sites in one day: the Valley of the Kings, the terraces of Hatshepsut’s temple, the Colossi of Memnon, the vast precinct of Karnak, and Luxor Temple in the heart of the city.
This is the complete Luxor day, and the sequence matters. We take the West Bank first while the morning is still cool, break for lunch, then cross to the East Bank for Karnak and Luxor Temple in the softer afternoon light. Egypt Best Vacations is based in Luxor and your guide is a working Egyptologist — which is the difference between walking through Karnak and understanding it. As a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Award winner for 2024, 2025 and 2026, we run the day privately, in your own air-conditioned vehicle, at your pace.
If you only have a morning, our half-day Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut Temple tour covers the West Bank alone. Browse all our Luxor day tours to compare.
7:00 AM: Your Egyptologist meets you in your hotel lobby in Luxor, or at your Nile cruise ship’s gangway, and you cross to the West Bank. From May to September we recommend a 6:00 AM start instead — the Valley of the Kings is a rock basin with no shade, and getting there first makes a real difference to the day.
7:30 AM – 9:30 AM — The Valley of the Kings: More than sixty tombs cut into the rock of this dry wadi for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom. Your standard ticket admits you to three tombs from those open on the day; the rotation changes for conservation, and your guide picks the three worth your time. Inside, your Egyptologist reads the walls with you: the sun god’s journey through the twelve hours of night, the weighing of the heart, texts never meant for living eyes. The blues and greens are ground mineral rather than dye, which is why three thousand years underground has barely touched them.
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM — The Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari: Three colonnaded terraces rising straight out of the cliff, so precisely matched to the rock behind that the building seems to have grown there. Hatshepsut ruled first as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III and then took the full titulary of a pharaoh, and her temple argues her case in stone. Your guide walks you through the Punt expedition reliefs and the divine birth colonnade on the second terrace — and shows you where Thutmose III’s workmen later chiseled her name away.
11:15 AM – 11:45 AM — The Colossi of Memnon: Two quartzite giants close to eighteen metres tall, all that is easily visible of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple — once the largest temple in Thebes, brought down by an earthquake. The northern statue then began to sound at dawn, drew Greek and Roman tourists for two centuries, and fell silent after a Roman repair around 199 AD. Behind them, the excavation at Kom el-Hettan has been re-erecting more of the temple’s colossi from the buried ruins.
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM — Lunch: A break at a local restaurant, included in your tour price, before crossing the Nile to the East Bank.
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM — Karnak Temple: Not one temple but a walled city of them, 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 continued for close to two thousand years, with every major pharaoh from the Middle Kingdom to the Ptolemies adding something, which is exactly why it bewilders people without a guide. The Great Hypostyle Hall alone holds 134 columns, the tallest of them twenty-one metres. Your Egyptologist unpicks the chronology for you: who built what, and why they wanted their name on this particular stone.
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM — Luxor Temple: Built by Amenhotep III and Ramesses II, with additions by Tutankhamun, Horemheb, a barque shrine raised under Alexander the Great, a Roman chamber for the imperial cult, and — still in use above the ancient stone — the mosque of Abu el-Haggag, built when the temple lay buried in sand. Few sites anywhere show three thousand years of continuous worship this plainly. The 2.7-kilometre Avenue of Sphinxes running north from here to Karnak carried the Opet Festival procession, when Amun’s statue travelled between the two temples to renew the king’s authority.
5:00 PM: Your Luxor full day tour ends with a transfer back to your hotel or cruise ship.
