Almost every account of a first trip to Egypt mentions the tipping, usually with irritation. That irritation comes from misreading it.

Baksheesh covers three different things that happen to share a word: a tip for service, a small payment for a small favour, and charity. Most of what visitors meet is the middle one, and it exists because a great many jobs around tourism are paid partly, or mostly, this way.

Who genuinely expects one

  • Your guide and your driver, at the end of a day or a trip. These are the significant ones and they are the ones people most often forget.
  • Hotel porters, housekeeping, and the boat crew on a Nile cruise — cruises usually run a crew box for the latter.
  • Restaurant staff, on top of any service charge already on the bill.
  • The man who opens a locked tomb, holds a door, or points out a relief you would have missed.
  • Bathroom attendants, who supply the paper and are paid by you and nobody else.

Who does not

Anybody who takes your camera and photographs you without being asked, then wants paying for it. Anyone who appears beside you at a site and starts explaining. Anyone who offers to show you a shortcut, a better view, or a special place.

None of this is dangerous and almost none of it is aggressive. A firm, friendly la, shukran — no, thank you — repeated once and then simply walking on, ends it. The mistake visitors make is engaging politely and at length, which reads as interest.

The Sphinx enclosure and the Giza plateau are where you meet most of this. It thins out dramatically everywhere else.

Why we do not publish amounts

The Egyptian pound has moved a very long way in a short time. Any figure written into an article ages badly within months, and a stale number is worse than no number — it makes visitors either look mean or overpay in a way that distorts things for everyone after them.

So: ask on day one. Your guide, your hotel's front desk, or your cruise manager will tell you what is normal this month, and they will tell you honestly because they would rather you got it right.

If you want a rough sense before you go, what an Egypt trip costs covers the shape of trip spending, and tipping should be budgeted as a real line rather than as loose change.

The practical mechanics

  • Break notes at every opportunity. Hotels, museums and cafés will change a large note; a man at a tomb door will not.
  • Keep tip money in a different pocket from your wallet. Opening a wallet full of large notes to hand over a small one is the thing to avoid.
  • Foreign currency is not helpful for small tips. Nobody at a site can use it and it cannot be banked easily.
  • Tip at the end, not the start. Tipping a guide in the morning does not improve the day and changes the relationship.
  • For a longer trip with the same guide and driver, one payment at the end is normal and easier than daily amounts.