The Top Red Flags to Watch Out for When Selecting a Tour Company in Egypt
TLDR: When you’re ready to start planning a trip to Egypt, here are the Top 9 Red Flags to Watch Out for When Selecting a Tour Company…
Egypt can often seem like the “Wild West” of global travel destinations. There’s an enormous lack of information, a lot of misinformation, a general disregard for the importance of information, and an unhelpful prevailing attitude throughout the country that if something is meant to be then it will surely happen and if not then it won’t.
For responsible international travelers who value planning, doing research, being informed, having information stay consistent, and generally knowing that something will be as expected on the ground in country when you actually show up, the lower professional standards that pervade the tourism industry in Egypt can be quite frustrating to deal with.
Fortunately, there are some honest, reputable, stable, and professional tourism companies that operate in Egypt. But traveler beware – not all that are professional are honest. And not all that are honest are stable and reputable.
To help future visitors to Egypt sort through the million and one entities that claim to be legitimate travel agencies or tour operators servicing Egypt as a destination, here are the top nine red flags to look out for when selecting a company to work with on putting together and executing your trip of a lifetime to Egypt.
🚩 Credit or debit cards are not accepted for payment
Any company or operation that does not accept credit or debit cards for payment is not a real company. The reason they cannot accept card payments is because they cannot get approved for a merchant account with a credit card processor, which only requires a minimal level of verification. If the outfit you’re dealing with can’t even pass this low bar for legitimacy, that should set off immediate alarm bells.
Non-legitimate operations on the ground in Egypt will often ask you to just bring cash and pay in person on arrival. But this opens you up to a lot of liability and risk. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this “company” could not even obtain a basic merchant account to accept credit cards, which offers YOU the most protection from fraud, but if the amount they’re asking you to bring in cash is more than $10,000 then you’ll need to do extra customs paperwork to declare it in each country you leave or pass through on the way to Egypt in addition to declaring it again on arrival into Egypt before you pass through customs. Failure to declare any amount of physical cash or monetary instruments in excess of $10k total risks having your cash seized and forfeited for violating customs laws. So there’s that for starters.
Paying for services in cash in Egypt also means that you have zero recourse if something goes wrong or if they don’t deliver what was promised, which is not an uncommon occurrence. This also holds true for paying by bank transfer or international wire, which is another common method of payment requested by companies that don’t have their act together enough to be able to accept online credit and bank card payments. In addition to being cumbersome and triggering anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing regulations and paperwork in most Western countries, sending wire transfers to Egypt also prevents you from having any recourse if what you’re paying for is not delivered as expected.
When paying for anything in Egypt by wire transfer, refunds for any reason are pretty much out of the question. This situation became shockingly clear to many international travelers who had booked trips to Egypt prior to the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic, many of whom lost all of their money because local service providers would not or could not issue refunds when the borders closed. Sometimes even if they wanted to, Egyptian banks were not allowing foreign currency to leave the country, meaning even those who were lucky enough to get some money offered back only had the option to pick up cash in person in the local currency, as US dollars and Euros are always too valuable to be repatriated.
If a company doesn’t offer you an to pay for a trip to Egypt in advance online with a credit or debit card, this is a big reason to go with another company. And the “in advance” part is important, because some companies will tell you that you can pay with a card once you arrive, but what they’re really going to do is take you to the store or shop of someone they know who can accept credit cards and have them process the payment for you. Again, this should tell you all you need to know about the legitimacy of the operation you’re dealing with and you should run away as fast as you can.
🚩 No IATA accreditation
This should go without saying, but a travel company that does not have an official accreditation from an international travel accrediting body is NOT a travel company. That’s just some guy or gal with a computer and maybe an Instagram account or a Facebook page, and these are not people you should be trusting with thousands of dollars of your money as well as your health and safety on a trip to a destination like Egypt.
IATA and CLIA are the two main travel agency accreditation agencies in the world – and in the world of travel. While CLIA is primarily for agencies that specialize in ocean cruises, IATA is by far the biggest, oldest, and most reputable travel agency accrediting organisation.
Getting accredited by IATA is no easy task, and that’s why seeing – and verifying – that the person, company, or operation you’re working with to plan and carry out a trip to Egypt is IATA certified is very important. The verifying part is especially critical because anyone can illegally throw up the IATA logo on their website. However, luckily IATA allows anyone to actually verify in real time whether a company is actually a legitimate and verified agency by going to IATA Check A Code website and entering the company name or the IATA code they provided.
A real IATA accreditation is particularly significant because the bar to get accredited by IATA is quite high. Travel agencies not only have to have their company incorporation documents and financials inspected and independently audited, but they also have to have references from other IATA-verified travel industry service providers and significant industry-specific experience and education in order to even apply for accreditation.
Needless to say, the tens of thousands of fly-by-night operations that can’t even get approved for a merchant account to accept credit cards certainly can’t get a legitimate IATA certification. So if the company you’re dealing with doesn’t have one, registered and verified IN THEIR OWN COMPANY NAME (not piggybacking off of another company’s IATA code), then that should be an obvious red flag that your money and your trip is at risk.
🚩 Shops and Restaurants Listed on an Itinerary
With only a few notable exceptions, nearly all tour companies in Egypt also participate in commission and kickback schemes with a variety of shops and even some restaurants. If a company offers you a touring itinerary that includes “visits” to any shops, other than the historic Khan el Khalili souq or bazaar, you should decline to proceed any further with them. Many companies will try to slip in some “mandatory shopping” with clever wording on an itinerary, such as by claiming a visit is to a “papyrus institute” or a “local textiles workshop,” or they’ll tell you all about how “you’ll see how local artisans continue the traditions of their ancestors by carving alabaster by hand with ancient tools” or “mix perfumes and essences with ancient recipes.” All of this is code for scamming, although some companies are just more eloquent and lexically creative than others.
What they’re really going to do is take you to specific shops they have deals with who will then add an extra 40-60% to the already-inflated price of whatever it is you’re buying in order to give a 40-60% kickback to the company (and/or guide) that brought you there. In all cases, there are much better places to buy common souvenirs such as papyrus or alabaster or jewellery in Egypt, if you really do want to purchase something like that during your trip. But a tour company that includes this as a stop in your itinerary by default will never take you to those best places because they won’t get as much of – or any – cut of the sale as a kickback for bringing you there. These high kickback and commission rates from shops in Egypt create perverse incentives that drive greed, bad recommendations, and sometimes even hostile experiences for tourists.
Similarly, if you’re in a large group and you see a certain restaurant listed on your itinerary, or if you’re with a guide who insists on only taking you to a certain restaurant, that’s almost always because the company or the guide will get a per-person kickback for taking you there, which will be added into your bill as a hidden extra charge.
🚩 Hidden mandatory costs that are glossed over
Nearly every tour company that operates in Egypt either does not pay or under-pays their front-line local staff and relies on you, the customer, to make up that shortfall in their income with generous tips. They may not tell you this at all or, more often, they may seriously mislead you on this fact, but this is the business model of nearly every tour company in Egypt. With very few exceptions (I know of only two companies in Egypt that honestly and fully include tipping in their up-front quoted costs), you are 100% expected to shell out hundreds of dollars above and beyond your tour cost in extra tips to the tour company’s front-line staff on the last day you see them.
That’s because Egypt is one of the biggest tipping cultures in the world, so at the end of a trip with almost ANY company in Egypt – and sometimes during the middle of it – you’ll find dozens of people with their hands out, either literally or metaphorically, expecting a handsome tip from you – the customer. This goes for guides, drivers, touring assistants, and local Egyptian tour leaders, who are supposed to be salaried professionals but often can’t resist the temptation to partake in the free-flow of tipping cash at the end of a trip or a trip segment.
While the absolute best companies will include tipping already calculated into the price the quote you from the very beginning of you reaching out to them, the absolute worst companies will try to low-ball you on the up-front sticker price of a tour and also tell you that tipping is completely discretionary. News flash – it’s not. If a tour company in Egypt does not tell you from the beginning that full and generous tipping is already included in the price they quote you, then you should add it in yourself when you calculate the total cost of a trip with that company. Many companies will suggest, often in fine print, amounts that each service worker expects to be tipped by each guest. But many others will not disclose this crucial information in order to lure you in with a more attractive tour price and overall trip budget.
Don’t be fooled. If a tour company tells you that tipping is optional or discretionary, run! A company that’s not honest with you from the beginning is not only likely to, but 100% guaranteed will, be dishonest with you at other points along the way. And once you’re already committed to a trip, whether by having paid a deposit or already being on the ground in Egypt and under their care, it’s nearly impossible to change your tour operator for a variety of logistical and practical reasons.
🚩 Forced or faked reviews
This one might be a little harder for the average visitor to Egypt to spot because scammers are extremely skilled at fooling online review sites and flooding them with positive, seemingly legitimate reviews. As a general rule, online reviews of any kind cannot be trusted for the tourism industry in Egypt. This is because it’s common practice all over Egypt for hotels, tour companies, guides, restaurants, shops, and other tourism industry businesses in Egypt to skilfully manipulate their online reviews proactively and on an ongoing basis.
Tactics range from businesses being extremely pushy – and even unprofessional – in asking guests for reviews (even at allegedly “high-end” companies or “five-star” hotels) on the lighter end, to standing over guests while pressuring them to log into review sites on the spot and show them the reviews they’ve left. There have even been cases of tour companies locking guests in cars, van, and busses until everyone has left an online review.
Then, as if forced reviews under duress aren’t bad enough, there is also an epidemic of systematic fake reviews for businesses in the tourism industry across Egypt. It costs nothing to create dozens or even hundreds of email accounts which can then be use over months and even years to review many different businesses all over the world, giving the appearance of well-traveled legitimate guests. There are even companies that specialize in offering systematic fake positive reviews for any business willing to pay as little as $20 per month – a worthwhile investment for mediocre and bad companies who need to have some way to validate themselves to unsuspecting potential foreign customers.
🚩 Subcontracted and white-labeled ground operations
There are hundreds of thousands of travel companies around the world that offer Egypt as a destination. But only a small fraction of those travel companies actually truly do operate on the ground in Egypt. The rest simply sub-contract or even white-label the trips to Egypt that they sell, and then some other completely unknown entity (unknown to you and often to them too) becomes fully responsible for where your money goes and how your trip to Egypt actually turns out.
Think about it – your local travel agent or agency obviously doesn’t have staff in every country to which they sell or organize travel. If you work with a travel agent or travel advisor, you do so because you know them and like them or you know OF them and trust their reputation. You think you’ve done your due diligence by knowing and trusting the person you’re dealing with, but what you don’t know is that they, in turn, have to trust – often blindly – several other layers of local contractors, sub-contractors, and sub-sub contractors to carry out your trip on the ground and actually provide the services you’ve paid for in country.
The most common example of sub-contracting in travel is with hotel stays and airfare. However, these are also the simplest and usually the most reliable. Although there are many hotels all across Egypt that are notoriously NOT reliable, and also one small domestic airline that you should always avoid, when someone books you into a major international hotel brand or gets you a seat on a well-known airline, you can be pretty sure that things will go within an acceptable range of expectations for dealing with hotels and airlines.
However, this is not at all the case when it comes to other types of service providers in Egypt. Not only are there literally thousands of tour operators in Egypt, but there are thousands more individuals who claim to be “companies” but who are instead just doing illegal tourism. And most of the time they can get away with it, but it’s neither safe nor smart to entrust your money, your trip, or your safety one of these rogue operators.
The government of Egypt has been trying for years to crack down on illegal tourism and rogue operators within the country through new regulations, permit and licensing requirements, checkpoints, paperwork checks at hotels and sites, and more. But scammers in Egypt are always two steps ahead of their government, and by the time a new regulation or requirement comes out, they’ve already figure out three ways to get around it.
And as I said, most of the time they can get away with these illegal work-arounds and not get caught. But if and when they do get caught, the foreign tourist is the one who loses the most, including potentially your money and the rest of your trip. For example, if you just find some guy on Instagram or Facebook who’s offering to sell you a “tour” of Egypt or even a day trip somewhere but who is not properly licensed and is not employed by a properly accredited travel company, if he gets caught while you’re with him, he’ll only get a slap on the wrist and he’ll pay a bribe to avoid going to jail, but he’ll also have to stop the illegal “tour” and you’ll miss out on the rest of whatever you were planning to visit.
Most visitors to Egypt only come to Egypt once in their life, especially those from long-haul markets like North and South America, Australia, and East Asia. Europeans and those from Western Asia might visit Egypt more than once in their lives because it’s a closer destination for them. But if you’re on the trip of a lifetime to see sites that you’ve waited your whole life to see, such as the Pyramids or the pharaohs’ tombs, you can’t afford to miss out on those experiences if the tourism police happen to catch and stop a fake guide, an unlicensed (for tourism) driver, or an illegal tour happening without a proper itinerary permit.
🚩 Local individuals offering touring services online
There is no shortage of tour guides – both real and fake – advertising their services in Egypt via various online platforms, social media sites/apps, and even stand-along web pages. However, spending thousands of dollars on a trip around Egypt through a local individual you found online, whether a licensed guide or not, can be a recipe for a ruined trip.
In the best-case scenario, you’ll have found someone who is legitimate and licensed and who will just be connecting you to a licensed and IATA-accredited tourism company who can sponsor your entire itinerary while using that particular guide for all or part of your journey around Egypt. But this is very seldomly what guides and individuals advertising online want you to do. Instead, they want you to just trust them with everything and let them arrange everything while hiding which company or companies they are piecing your trip together through, sometimes legally and sometimes not.
More often than not, however, people who advertise themselves online as guides aren’t even guides at all. They’re just individuals doing illegal tourism and suckering foreign tourists who don’t know the rule sand regulations of proper, legal tourism in Egypt. Some of the best scammers have the sleekest, flashiest, and sometimes the most professional-looking online personas, leaving the target victim with the impression that they have found a legitimate, legal, professional operation to do business with in Egypt. More often than not, local individuals offering services online directly to consumers are a huge red flag and should be avoided.
🚩 Fake or unlicensed tour guides
Egypt has tried very hard to crack down on fake tour guides over the past decade, but the problem persists and many people still get tricked into visiting a site or touring an area of the country with someone who is breaking the law – and risking getting you in trouble too – by doing illegal tour guiding. Tour guides in Egypt must be licensed by both the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and by the Egyptian Tour Guides Syndicate. This licensure requires them to complete either a 2-year or 4-year educational program that covers all eras of Egyptian history, after which they must take extensive exams to ensure that they have truly learned the material and are prepared to correctly share Egypt’s vast history with foreign tourists who visit the country.
However, there are many people out there who either don’t want to or can’t get into a tour guide educational program, instead seeking to bypass the time investment it takes to become a licensed – and legal – tour guide in Egypt. These scammers are usually the ones who are marketing themselves on social media and trying to get potential foreign visitors to follow them and trust them in the lead-up to their trips so that they can reel them in and “guide” them right on over to all of the scammy shops and tourist traps where their wallets can be drained with high-pressure, aggressive sales pitches, tactics, and tricks.
The best tour guides in Egypt, and even the broad mid-tier band of good and ok tour guides, don’t need to scavenge for work on social media sites or other online portals because they already have great relationships with the best tour companies who give them plenty of work on a very consistent basis. The top guides have been working with the same companies for many years and are booked up months in advance, sometimes up to six months in advance for the winter high season. These top-tier guides are not out there trying to sell themselves as one-stop-shops for trips to and around Egypt, but are instead honest working professionals who have built great working relationships with one or a few tour companies over their careers and are given regular schedules of clients to work with by these companies.
In addition to the quality issue, falling victim to a fake tour guide or an individual trying to falsely portray himself or herself as a legal tour operator company or travel agency can also have the consequence of your trip being interrupted or ruined if they get caught in the act of doing illegal tourism. Having your “guide” or your “person” from what you thought was a legal touring operation get arrested in the middle of our “tour” around Egypt can put a real damper on your once-in-a-lifetime trip and leave you essentially stranded without knowing where to go next or how to get there. Don’t expect to get your money back either if they get caught doing illegal tourism with you. You’ll just be out of luck and potentially out of a lot of money too.
🚩 No mix of both foreign and local staff
Whether we want to admit it or not, and whether we like it or not, Americans know American consumers best, Koreans know Korean consumers best, Brazilians know Brazilian consumers best, and so on. Similarly, Egyptians are experts at knowing the standards, tastes, preferences, habits, expectations, and cultural nuances of other Egyptians, but not foreign guests. This basic fact very often leads to misunderstandings, communication breakdowns, and expectation letdowns when traveling in Egypt and when putting yourself in a situation in which you have to rely on locals only for understanding, preparing for, communicating, and implementing what foreigners form different regions and cultures expect traveling.
The best tour operations in Egypt have a mix of both foreign and local staff on the ground. Furthermore, they specialize in certain markets, such as the English-speaking market or the East Asian market or the spiritual traveler market. Specialization equals experience and expertise within the travel industry, so you not only want your tour company to specialize in the language or geographical market you’re coming from, but you should also make sure they specialize in the destination you’re going to – Egypt.
Jack-of-all-markets tour companies consistently deliver a lower standard of quality, and the same goes for locals-only companies that can’t find any foreign travel industry professionals who are willing to work with them on the ground in Egypt or which don’t have the wisdom and experience to know the value of having cultural liaisons on the ground to be the bridge to – and sometimes the protector from – local standards.
Whether you’re in a larger tour group with an on-the-ground tour leader from your home country or you’re doing a private tour around Egypt but with a company who has on-the-ground staff who are native speakers of your language, this is critically important when picking a tour company to work with in Egypt.
Egypt is a wonderful country and is absolutely worth visiting and spending time in, but it’s not like other places you’ve ever traveled. It’s not a place where you can just wing it, nor is it a place you should take risks and just hope things will work out. Given that most people only come to Egypt once in their life and invest a lot in making this bucket list trip a truly memorable one, it’s critical that you educate yourself about this unique destination before you go there and that you make the proper preparations for your on-the-ground experience well in advance. Ignoring the red flags in a place like Egypt can lead to you not getting everything out of your trip that you had hoped to at best, and having a trip ruined at worst.
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So be smart, use common sense, don’t ignore red flags, and go with a verified and legitimate travel agency and tour operator that specializes in Egypt when planning your trip here. After all, you’ve waited your whole life to visit Egypt, and you deserve for your trip to be smooth, special, and every bit as magnificent and unforgettable as you expect.
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