Travel Innovation
Volunteer Tours
Volunteer Tourism or Voluntourism is not a brand new type of tourism, but it is certainly new to Egypt. The extent of volunteering by tourists is cleaning the river bank from trash for half a day during the tour. This activity is done by one tour operator only.
We thought of taking this further and be true to the definition of Volunteer Tourism as stated by Voluntourism Organization. Short term volunteering is not usually a few hours, it can extend to a few days, where the travelers are dedicating part of their leisure time to benefit the community.
This article shows more details on our view and effort to create Voluntourism opportunities.
A group of 8 USA travelers visited this orphanage in luxor for 5 days. They painted all the walls of the orphanage and made wooden desks to help create a suitable study environment for the kids.
What was truly amazing was the impact on the boys in this orphanage in Luxor. They felt cared for and the fact that travelers visited them for 5 consecutive days had resulted in broadening their ambition to a better future and education.
Culinary Tourism
Sampling local cuisine is a favorite practice for most travelers. Building on this fact, we designed a culinary tour back in 2017. The tour involves sampling Middle Eastern cuisine rather than actually doing the cooking, although the cooking feature can be easily added should the need arise.
Since then, embedding the culinary experience became part of all our products now that we have the basis for it.
If this seems strange to you, know this fact: almost all restaurants located in tourist areas would offer you Mixed Grill dish as the dish of the day and every day…
The culinary tour journey was pretty educational for us too. We learned some amazing facts about our cuisine. For example, one of our favorite Egyptian dishes is called Koshary, mixture of rice, lintels, pasta & caramelized onion. Turns out this is an Indian dish that was introduced to Egypt during British occupation.
Walking Tours
In our quest of developing new products, we realized that walking and hiking holidays are non-existent on the Nile. Therefore we started the effort of trying to introduce a new product. We were able to create an easy walking tour in 2008 and received our first walking group in March 2009.
The itinerary included a minimum of 5 KM walking distance per day, however, the real highlight was the people we met along the trail.