Nile cruise or land tour — what each one actually buys you

A Nile cruise and a land tour are not better and worse versions of the same holiday. They buy different things, and the choice is easier once you see what each one actually costs you. A cruise buys the string of temples between Luxor and Aswan with no repacking and no road. A land tour buys Cairo, a hotel you chose, and the freedom to change your mind on Wednesday. Almost nobody regrets either. People regret picking one for the wrong reason.

The short version

• Take the cruise if Upper Egypt is the point of the trip, if you want the temples in geographic order without a single long drive, and if being fed and moved on a schedule sounds restful rather than confining.
• Take the land tour if Cairo matters to you, if you want more than a single night anywhere, if you have children who need a pool at four in the afternoon, or if your idea of a holiday includes deciding at breakfast what the day looks like.
• Take both — a few nights on the water inside a longer land itinerary — if you have ten days or more. This is what most of our longer round trips actually are, and it is the answer we give more often than either extreme.

A Nile cruise ship moored on the river at Luxor

What a cruise is really like

The boat moves at night and in the early morning, and moors during the day. You wake up somewhere new roughly every day without having packed anything. Meals are on board, included, and buffet. Excursions leave from the mooring, usually early, and come back to the boat.

The stops between Luxor and Aswan are the reason the format exists. Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo sit almost on the water, and a cruise reaches all three without a single hour on a coach. Doing the same three temples from a Luxor hotel means three separate road days, most of them spent driving.

The double temple at Kom Ombo, on the bank of the Nile

What nobody mentions: the boats are close together. At a busy mooring, ships raft up two, three and four deep, and you walk through other people's lobbies to reach the bank. Your cabin window may look at another hull for a night. This is normal, it is not a sign anything has gone wrong, and it surprises people every single season.

The other thing to know is that the schedule is not yours. The excursion goes at six because the temple is bearable at seven and unbearable at eleven. If you like a slow morning, a cruise will feel like being organised at.