Is It Ethical to Visit Egypt? An Egyptian's Honest Answer
Of all the questions travellers send us, one arrives more often than any other, usually written carefully, sometimes almost apologetically: is it ethical to visit Egypt at all? I am Egyptian, I run a travel company, and I am going to try to answer it the way I would want it answered if I were the one asking, which means without a brochure's reflexes. The honest answer is: it depends almost entirely on how you come.
First, respect for the question itself. People ask it because they read the news, because they have seen how mass tourism can hollow out the places it loves, and because they have noticed that "just come, tourism helps everyone" is the answer of people selling something. Those instincts are correct, and a company that waves them away does not deserve your trust. So let me take the question apart into the pieces it is actually made of.
Where the money goes
Tourism is one of Egypt's economic lifelines; millions of households depend on it, from guides and drivers to farmers, cooks, boat crews and craftspeople. But whether your visit reaches those households is a design question, not an automatic one. Researchers call the failure "leakage": on some all-inclusive packages in developing countries, the UN Environment Programme has estimated that as little as five dollars of every hundred a traveller spends remains in the destination, with the rest flowing to foreign owners, importers and intermediaries. The same holiday, rebuilt around local guides, family-run houses, locally owned boats and local tables, reverses that arithmetic. We have written about this at length in our essay on why ethical travel matters more in Egypt than almost anywhere; the short version is that your itinerary is a routing decision for your money, whether you think of it that way or not.
The leakage problem, drawn simply. The $5 figure is the UN Environment Programme's estimate for some all-inclusive packages in developing countries.
The boycott question
Some travellers wonder whether staying away is the more ethical act. I understand the impulse, and I will answer it as an Egyptian rather than as a businessman: a tourism boycott is a blunt instrument that lands almost entirely on the wrong people. The guide who studied for years, the Nubian family serving dinner on their island, the felucca captain, the woman running a craft cooperative in an oasis, these are the people an empty season punishes, and they are precisely the people with the least say in anything a traveller might be protesting. Coming carefully, and choosing carefully whom your visit enriches, does more good than absence. Presence is also its own kind of exchange; the conversations between our guests and their Egyptian hosts run in both directions, and both sides are changed by them.
The camel at the pyramids
Now the part of this essay I most need to write, because it involves saying no to one of the most photographed moments in world travel. Nordnile does not offer, book or recommend camel or horse rides at the pyramids of Giza, and we ask our guests not to buy them on their own. This is not squeamishness; it is a conclusion drawn from a documented record. Since 2019, international animal-welfare investigations have repeatedly shown working animals at Egypt's most famous sites beaten, worked through extreme heat without adequate shade, food or water, denied veterinary care, and discarded or sold for slaughter when they can no longer earn. The Egyptian authorities have acknowledged the problem in their own way, pledging reforms, launching a national programme for the care of animals at archaeological sites in late 2024, and introducing electric buses at Giza in 2025, and several major international travel platforms have stopped selling the rides altogether. I hope the reforms become real. But follow-up footage as recent as this year shows how far the ground still is from the press release, and until the reality changes, a ride purchased at Giza pays into the system as it is, not as it is promised to become.
The pyramids have stood for forty-five centuries. They do not need a saddle to be seen, and no photograph is worth what the animal beneath it may be living.
Here is the principle underneath, and it is the same one that shapes everything else we do: when a bucket-list moment requires a being, human or animal, to be diminished for it, we give up the moment and say so out loud. It costs us bookings occasionally; travellers have arrived with the camel photo already imagined. What we offer instead is the plateau on foot in the early light, the panoramic points where the three pyramids align, and the time to actually stand before them, which is the experience the saddle was always interrupting. Guests who want camels in their journey can meet them in places where they live differently, as working companions in desert communities that depend on their wellbeing; ask us and we will be honest about where that is true and where it is theatre. And anywhere in the world, the test travels with you: look at the animal's condition, its shade, its water, and whether the handler minds you looking. If the answer discomforts you, so should the ticket.
What else we decline, and why
The camel stand is the visible one, but the same test retires other fixtures of the standard Egypt tour. We run no shopping stops, the choreographed papyrus-and-perfume detours that exist because commissions flow back to whoever delivered you, because they convert your afternoon into someone else's margin and corrode the honesty of every recommendation a guide makes. We do not stage villages or dress hospitality up as performance; when our guests share a meal with a Nubian family, it is dinner, not a show about dinner. None of this is sacrifice, in the end. Every one of these subtractions returns something better: time, trust and encounters that were not designed to extract from either side.
Yes, if the how is right
So: is it ethical to visit Egypt? My answer is yes, conditionally, and the conditions are all within the traveller's control. Come in a way that routes your money to households rather than through them. Decline the moments that require someone's diminishment, however famous the photograph. Travel with people who will tell you what they say no to and why, because a company with no refusals has no ethics, only marketing. Egypt has been receiving guests for longer than almost any place on Earth; it deserves guests who arrive as if that history obliges them to something. We built our whole company on the belief that it does.