Greek and Roman visitors left graffiti on the monuments at Giza. That is tourism with a receipt, two thousand years before the word — people travelling to look at something old, and scratching their names to prove they had been. Egypt has been receiving sightseers longer than any country in this register, and almost everything on this page is a variation on managing them.
The word this country gave the trade
The Greek pandokheion — receiving all comers — became the Arabic funduq, and from there the Italian fondaco, the Spanish alhóndiga and eventually the French and English hotel's neighbour in every Mediterranean language. ⚑ The Venetian trading house and the Arab khan are the same word travelling in opposite directions, and Egypt is the hinge.
Mamluk Cairo built them at scale as the wikala: storage below, cells above, a single guarded gate. Wikala al-Ghuri of 1504–05 still stands and is now a performance venue. And Khan el-Khalili, founded in 1382 by the emir Jarkas el-Khalili on the site of the Fatimid tombs, is the case where the building type became a quarter and kept its name.
November 1869, twice
Two things happened in the same month and between them they made modern Egypt a destination. The Suez Canal opened, shortening Europe to Asia by weeks and putting the country on every route east. And Thomas Cook ran his first Nile steamers, Cairo to Aswan, fixed itinerary, fixed price.
⚑ The package tour was invented in Britain and proved in Egypt. Cook's firm effectively ran Egyptian tourism for decades — the boats, the beds, the guides, the tickets — and the Nile cruise is the first packaged long-stay leisure product in this register. It is still the shape of the market a hundred and fifty years later, which almost nothing else in this Library can claim.
One Swiss company owned all of it
Shepheard's from 1841 was the most famous hotel in Africa for a century, and its terrace was where the imperial world met. Mena House, a khedivial hunting lodge opened as a hotel in 1886, was the first hotel in Egypt with electricity and looks straight at the Great Pyramid; Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek held the Cairo Conference in it in November 1943. The Old Cataract at Aswan was built by Cook in 1899 for his own passengers. The Winter Palace at Luxor opened in 1907.
⚑ And Charles Baehler's Egyptian Hotels company held all four at once. A Swiss hotelier owned every grand hotel a European would have been able to name in a country he was not from — the cleanest case of concentrated foreign ownership anywhere in this register, and the reason the Egyptian season ran like a single circuit rather than a market.
1922, and the first modern tourism boom in the region
Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922, working from the Winter Palace, and the news went out from its terrace. What followed was the first modern tourism boom of the Middle East — a rush of visitors produced by a single discovery, filling Luxor's hotels and the Cook boats that reached them.
The register records it as a hospitality event and not only an archaeological one. Egypt had spent eighty years building the beds. 1922 is when the demand arrived to fill them.
26 January 1952
Shepheard's burned in the Cairo fire. ⚑ The register holds it as a lost house with its own record, and keeps it strictly apart from the modern Shepheard, which is a different building on a different site. The Library does this for the Wright Imperial in Tokyo, the Hotel Moskva in Moscow and the Gulf Hotel in Doha, and it matters most here: a hotel that burned in a political fire is not continued by a hotel that borrowed its name.
The town that was not a resort
From 1989 Samih Sawiris built El Gouna out of empty Red Sea desert — not a resort but a town, with hotels, marinas, a hospital, a school and an airport. Sharm el-Sheikh grew on Sinai in the same period at volume rather than at quality.
El Gouna is the important one because it was exported. Through Muriya — Orascom seventy per cent, Oman's state developer thirty — the same integrated resort-town model built Hawana Salalah and Jebel Sifah. An Egyptian answer to the Red Sea coast became the Omani answer to it, and the register can see that because it holds both ends.
The capital flowed the other way too. Mohamed Al-Fayed bought the Ritz Paris in 1979 and Harrods in 1985 — Egyptian money buying the grandest European addresses half a century before the Gulf funds did the same thing, and a full generation before this register started calling that a reversal.
What Egypt is, against the register
Oman chose restraint. The Emirates built an industry. Qatar incorporated. Saudi Arabia designed. India had the doctrine. Iran built the road and lost the industry twice.
Egypt was organised — by somebody else. A British firm ran the tours, a Swiss company owned the hotels, a French engineer cut the canal and an English archaeologist supplied the demand. The Egyptian names on this page — Sawiris, Al-Fayed — arrive late and immediately start building abroad. The country that gave the trade its word spent a century as the best organised destination in the world and owned very little of it, and the modern story is what happens after that reverses.
⚑ The gap is named plainly. No Arabic-language source was read, the register holds almost nothing of the Egyptian-owned hotel trade between 1952 and 1989, and the wikala fabric of Cairo is held as three examples where dozens survive. The Mamluk middle and the Nasserist decades are the parts we have least of.