There’s nothing like a good fam trip. A picture of you having an amazing experience on Facebook is worth its weight in marketing gold, allowing your clients to envision themselves where you are. Meanwhile, you learn the nuances that show why they need you, and make the personal friendships and connections that keep the trip on track when they do go.
When your destination is Egypt—a third-world country with an ancient infrastructure and an old-fashioned economy that suddenly finds itself a top international destination
—all those things are more important than ever. With its ancient pyramids, famous boy king Tut, and promise of Middle Eastern spice, its unique character makes it a sale different from any other.
And that’s why it’s important to experience it before you sell it, say the travel advisors on our fam trip last week. We walked in the footsteps of the Pharaohs, climbed the 4,000-year-old pyramids in Giza, and sailed the Nile like a modern-day Moses. We dodged the desert heat to duck into Tutankhamun’s tomb and peered at perfectly preserved paint jobs on hieroglyphics carved by ancient hands. We saw the Sphinx, the temples of Abu Simbel and Karnak and Luxor, and watched farmers till the fertile black soil that makes this country’s fruit so delicious. We bargained for fresh spices on the cobblestones streets of Old Cairo and rode a hot air balloon over the Valley of the Kings. Then we ordered some Egyptian chardonnay and turned up the air conditioning at the Four Seasons, the Intercontinental, and the Fairmont Hotel.
In short, if your clients like their history mixed with and a touch of adventure and luxury, Egypt is a destination they will never forget. But it surely is not Kansas.
“If I have a client who has been to most popular destinations, I’m steering them to Eastern Europe, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,” says Jenny Mancini of Vacation Design Travel in Greenville, NY. “But having been here in Egypt, I would set their expectations. I’d tell them Cairo is a very old and very crowded city, and our tour had a security guard who traveled with us. So be prepared for that. The people are amazing—and they are careful with their American visitors, so I’ve felt very safe. The city is beautiful, the sights are beyond words. Sailing down the Nile was just as I expected—palm trees, men in long white robes who look like Jesus and Joseph. I’ve felt like I’m driving and sailing through the Bible. It’s a very special destination.”
Here are a few other things we learned:
**When traveling in a third-world country, always consider the luxury option. The definition of four-star loses something in the translation.
**Everything involving American tourists in Egypt is carefully managed by the government, so using a DMC who is well-connected is important. When two members of our group decided to take a cab home one night, for example, our fam trip host Yasser Salah, owner of Cadence Vacations, quickly arranged for an armed guard to go with them. And when he invited us to his home for an amazing Egyptian dinner cooked by his wife, a police car tailed our bus to ensure there were no issues.
**The dollar goes a long way, even at the five-star Intercontinental. We feasted on wine and lamb chops and went for the oxtail and pigeon for about $70 per couple including tip. (Tastes just like chicken 😊.)
**Beware the water. But the hotels offer plenty of free bottled water. (And the front desk on our boat offered up free pills for those in need.)
**Like many fams, ours was planned to take advantage of off-season rates. Clients surely would be more comfortable in the swing seasons, in early May and November, when rates are low but the weather is cooler. (Personally, I found tackling the 111-degree heat in Aswan to be an experience in its own right. But it did force us to move quickly among the amazing sights, when many would have preferred to linger.)
**On our fam, travel advisor Christopher Lingren noted that “even more than other destinations in the world, small private group touring is a way to really maximize the experience. Large, mass tour groups coupled with the heat and minimal interaction with the guides would diminish a client’s enjoyment and exploration of the unique nature of the antiquities to be discovered. Groups like ours, with no more than 10, offer the best experience and personal interaction with the guides.” I’ll add that we had excellent guides who knew their history backwards and forwards, and understood how to protect us from the heat as much as possible (we love you, Suzie and Adel).
News from the Bullrushes
No report in TRO would be complete without a little news, so here’s what I gleaned:
Expect the long-awaited and long-delayed opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum to miss its current promised opening date of November. My inside information holds that the hotels will be given a heads-up of a month or two in advance, so they can hold space for the expected deluge of visitors and officials for the ceremonies, and that has not yet come. November Egypt time = January at the earliest.
It boggles the modern mind to see the brightness of the paint, the details of the hieroglyphics, and the scientific knowledge (including a full prescription for a cure for erectile disfunction and amazing drawings of the best way to give birth, in a sitting position) on the pyramids and in the tombs, some dating back to 2300 BC. Even now, the age of discovery is not over, and there is always something new to see. Just last month, archeologists discovered a sarcophagus in Sakarra.
We spent our first three nights at the Four Seasons Cairo at the First Residence, owned by the royal family of Qatar. The first Four Seasons (FS) in the Middle East, it has the largest rooms in the city and an attached Nile barge with five restaurants for outdoor or indoor dining. It has been joined by three more FS properties in Egypt, in Cairo, Alexandria and Sharm El Sheikh, and three more are planned in coming months. The United States is the #1 customer base, and appreciated for its “high spend on food and beverage.”
Cruising on the Nile is a growing business. We shared our ship, the Coral Sea Tulip, with a group of 35 guests on a Vacations by Disney tour and, while we agreed it was not a “luxury” experience by our US standards, it was clean. The food was good and plentiful, and the staff was helpful and friendly. There are higher-end options, of course. Viking this week opened bookings for the 82-guest Viking Hathor, and Uniworld kicked off its inaugural Rivers of the World trip in Cairo. We also waved to the AMA Dahlia, parked next to us at the Coral Sea dock in Aswan.
A final thanks to Yasser Salah, whose staff at Cadence Vacations and Xanadu Tours kept us safe and happy. He has been providing B2B travel opportunities to US travel advisors in the US and Canada for almost 40 years.
My column is due in 15 minutes, so I’ll stop now. Feel free to post questions and I’ll try to answer every one personally. But here’s one Q&A to take away:
Q: Travel to Egypt seems more complicated than most vacations. Is it worth it?
A: It’s nothing like a week at an all-inclusive in Puerto Vallarta. But if you are looking for a relatively safe adventure that gives you a taste of life at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East, brings the history of the world and the major religions to life, and is utterly Instagrammable and FOMO-inducing, a tour with Tut is a trip of a lifetime.
“The entire history of the world started here,” says travel advisor Joao Donadel, whose business plan includes visiting at least three new destinations a year that he hopes to sell to his clients at Elite Wanderings in Los Angeles. His Instagram posts and reels from the Egypt FAM already have brought three clients who have expressed interest, from among his 80,000 luxury-oriented followers.
“I’ve never had a request for Egypt, but I came thinking, ‘I can sell this,’ ” he told TRO. “There is luxury everywhere.”
Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.
