You’ve been waiting for this trip to Hurghada for months counting down the days and it’s finally time to go. Ready to hit the pools, slides and sun beds, so here are the essentials for when you first arrive.

Visas

One of the most common questions I see online about people visiting Egypt is about Visas. When there is no reason to worry or overthink it. There are two options for buying a visa for your adventure to Egypt, you can buy an E-Visa before you arrive, or buy it at Hurghada airport upon arrival.

So I would forget about the E-visa. I just do not see any point in doing it and have heard stories where on arrival it hadn’t gone smoothly.

So my advice would be to just buy it at the airport. At Hurghada airport there are some bank booths with glass fronts on the right when walking to passport control just pop up to them the price is £25/$25/€25 in cash. It’s best to pay in US dollars because it’s the best value on the exchange rate. Within minutes they have entered the VISA sticker into your passport and you are on your way to passport control to have it stamped.

Top tip: Always ask for a landing card while on the airplane as the green booths handing them out can be a bit hectic.

Taxis in Hurghada

Hurghada is a pretty big place, so you’ll need some wheels to get around. I would not recommend hiring a car, as the driving culture in Egypt is nothing like any other country you would of been to before. So that leaves Taxis, Uber and In Drive.

But first things first, getting from the airport. If like me you can’t stand getting on the travel agent transfer coach and visiting every hotel in the city, and ironically getting to your hotel as the last stop. (Everytime ey?) So for this trip, I would recommend booking a private car before you come.

The best website I have found for this would be Hoppa. For the return trip, you should get change for £20 and have an entire transfer to yourself straight to your hotel. This also means you will be beating anybody else on your flight to the check-in desk at the hotel. Considering when I travelled here my travel agency wanted £120 for 6 passengers on the coach that visits the entire city before your hotel. Bargain. The driver will be waiting for you at arrivals with your name on a sign, ready to get you to your final destination.

Top tip: Take your Hoppa driver’s phone number so you can arrange through WhatsApp any future lifts that maybe needed.

For all other trips, I would use Uber or Indrive. Uber is good for having a pre-determined price, but a lot of drivers will want cash and cancel the trip if not. InDrive is a really good alternative, where you put the price you want to pay into the App. Then the drivers accept or decline it depending on whether they see value in the job.

Mobile data

So we are in 2024, and we all are heavily connected to our phones. The hotel says they have wifi but you already know it’s going to be garbage! Can’t wait to be scrolling TikTok? Well, heres my advice on how to keep connected at the best value.

So before you leave, I would get onto a site like Maya Mobile and get yourself the cheapest E-sim. At the time of writing this, for 1 GB of data which is active for 5 days, it costs $4 (£3.21). I recommend this for peace of mind, for being able to contact your transfer driver if you can’t find them, or you reach the hotel and have forgotten to print your Hotel Voucher you can quickly access it on your phone with no worries. You can skip this if you want, and go straight onto the next bit.

So if you didn’t want an e-sim or you are burning through the 1 GB I would recommend going to Senzo Mall using any of the methods of travel in the Taxi section. The local sims in Egypt are extremely good value, we managed to get 5 sims each with 40 GB of data for £48. So if you’re just buying 1 sim you should budget about £10-12, and this will easily give you enough data to last any 2-week trip. I asked a lot of locals their opinion on which network had the best coverage/speed, and it was a pretty landslide victory for Etilsat they have a booth just outside Spinneys (Check out this in the next section)

Getting some snacks!

We all need some proper snacks ready in the hotels even if we are all inclusive. A crisp and sweet stash is essential for all of us.

So this is a great one to tie in with the trip for an Egyptian Sim, just next to the Etilsat booth I told you about in the last paragraph is a huge supermarket comparable to Asda or Tesco, and guess what DIRT CHEAP! You could pick up an entire trolley’s worth of snacks and your jaw will drop at the price. The haul in the picture below came to a whopping £2.90.

Excursions

The hotels in Hurghada are something out of the world. They put so much time and effort into making each and every one of them have a place in your memories forever, but also Egypt is such a beautiful place that you’ve got to get out and do some trips. My advice for finding the best value excursions would be to take a look on GetYourGuide and would highly recommend the Trip to Orange Bay it was our favourite trip in Hurghada by far! Click here to book the same trip we went on 😀