Egypt holidays: Nile tourism plummets

The Old Cataract hotel in Aswan that was used as a location for the film of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, and which underwent a multi-million pound refurbishment in 2011, stands almost empty.
This year, the biggest casualty on the Nile is tourism.

Easter is one of Egypt’s peak tourism weeks, along with Christmas and October half term. During an Easter visit a few years before the 2011 Arab Spring and the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president, there were so many visitors in Luxor that we stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the Valley of the Kings and had to wait 20 minutes to enter some of the tombs. This Easter, there was more than enough room in the valley to feel lonely, and no queues at the tombs. No problem getting a hotel room, either.

Tourism has been on the slide since demonstrators took to Tahrir Square at the beginning of 2011. Each calamitous event since then has made a bad situation worse, from tear-gas and pitch battles in downtown Cairo to kidnapping in Sinai. February’s fatal hot-air balloon crash in Luxor dealt another body blow to the country’s flailing tourism industry. There are car crashes, muggings, lawlessness and yes, balloon crashes elsewhere in the world, but each new story from Egypt – of torture or legal standoff, or of Islamist extremists wanting to dismantle the pyramids, cover the statues and ban alcohol – now feeds into a narrative of national collapse.