Accommodations were great, including the Movenpick Royal Lily. Especially enjoyed our time on the Nile. Randa, our “tour manager” was less effective than the tour managers we had on our prior two smarTours trips. She is very personable - would be good to share drinks or a meal with, however, she was virtually unable to keep to a schedule & was not very good at communicating needed info in a timely manner. Finally, we found the Egyptians we met to be very friendly but the country itself is dirty & trashy. The “great monuments” were vastly overrated, in our opinion, and Randa’s explanations at the various key sites were very uninspired and “canned” without any interesting contextual basis - the exact opposite of our experience when we went to South Africa with smarTours. Also, we appreciate that we had such good security protection - but, had we known the security situation was that fragile & dicey we would not have gone (e.g. day after we left, terrorists attacked a bus of Egyptian Christians several miles south of Cairo, killed 7 & wounded 19!!). Glad we got out alive. Finally, the folks in our tour group were very nice and enjoyable to travel with.