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About a year ago, I had a tour credit, like half the world it seems, and a desire to start international travel again, but was a bit tentative, with international restrictions still uncertain and uneven. So I decided a single destination would be the thing to do and I plumped to do Intrepid's "Premium Egypt" tour, mainly for the couple of days cruising down the Nile. (The tour I had a credit with included Ukraine 
.)
I've been to Egypt twice before, in the early 1990s, for work, and we did manage to skive off a few days to see Luxor, Valley of the Kings and Cairo/Pyramids, but its time to give them another go, and to fill in a few gaps, such as the Citadel in Cairo and the Step Pyramids of Djoser at Saqqara. Also, the new Grand Egyptian Museum was due to be opened by now, and is in the program, and that was a major plus. (Its not open)
The tour:
For the flights, it was a no-brainer to go QR and QSuites (J), and out of habit, I decided to fly ex-ADL, as good seats tend to be available for longer there. Qantas connecting flight ex HBA added no extra
and DOH-CAI-DOH is classified as First - in actuality it's Business, but in that part of the world, the regional J cabins are tagged First, which means extra Avios and admission to the Al Safwa lounge both ways.
With Qantas going downhill fast, and they having gifted me Plat until March 2024, I decided earlier this year to credit the QR flights to QR's program, which shares Avios with BA and now has a tie-up with Virgin. The QR/VA alliance hadn't started at that point and fortunately I left my MEL-HBA leg unbooked, so it was a no brainer to add VA as the last leg of the journey.
Qantas naturally played silly bu**ers with my booking. They stopped running HBA-ADL direct earlier in the year, but didn't cancel my flight until about a month out. My TA booked me HBA-MEL-ADL, but as I didn't trust QF to run as scheduled, I had to build some padding into that part of the journey and gritted my teeth and took a whY-only bird to MEL.
A TR by @boomy not long ago reinforced my looking-forward to this trip.
The tour included meeting at CAI on arrival, and a ride to the tour hotel, the Steigenberger out at Giza, by the pyramids. I arranged to arrive 2 days prior to the tour to give me time to recover after the inevitable poor sleep on the way over, and padding in case of irrops (remember, booked 10 months ago).
A slight complication was that the evening before I was to fly out of HBA, I was to give the dinner speech to a national conference being held in Hobart - 260 people at $160/head!! That took a lot of preparation time, at the same time I was trying to remember what to pack (HLO).
Anyway, it all went OK and the HBA QP was for once uncrowded. On boarding, it turned out that Qantas put a business-configured B717 on the leg HBA-MEL. So 1E got me an OK seat, but only whY points and SCs, even though it was a J ticket. One last way to screw me over, eh Alan?
Off we go.
.)I've been to Egypt twice before, in the early 1990s, for work, and we did manage to skive off a few days to see Luxor, Valley of the Kings and Cairo/Pyramids, but its time to give them another go, and to fill in a few gaps, such as the Citadel in Cairo and the Step Pyramids of Djoser at Saqqara. Also, the new Grand Egyptian Museum was due to be opened by now, and is in the program, and that was a major plus. (Its not open
)The tour:
For the flights, it was a no-brainer to go QR and QSuites (J), and out of habit, I decided to fly ex-ADL, as good seats tend to be available for longer there. Qantas connecting flight ex HBA added no extra
and DOH-CAI-DOH is classified as First - in actuality it's Business, but in that part of the world, the regional J cabins are tagged First, which means extra Avios and admission to the Al Safwa lounge both ways.With Qantas going downhill fast, and they having gifted me Plat until March 2024, I decided earlier this year to credit the QR flights to QR's program, which shares Avios with BA and now has a tie-up with Virgin. The QR/VA alliance hadn't started at that point and fortunately I left my MEL-HBA leg unbooked, so it was a no brainer to add VA as the last leg of the journey.
Qantas naturally played silly bu**ers with my booking. They stopped running HBA-ADL direct earlier in the year, but didn't cancel my flight until about a month out. My TA booked me HBA-MEL-ADL, but as I didn't trust QF to run as scheduled, I had to build some padding into that part of the journey and gritted my teeth and took a whY-only bird to MEL.
A TR by @boomy not long ago reinforced my looking-forward to this trip.
The tour included meeting at CAI on arrival, and a ride to the tour hotel, the Steigenberger out at Giza, by the pyramids. I arranged to arrive 2 days prior to the tour to give me time to recover after the inevitable poor sleep on the way over, and padding in case of irrops (remember, booked 10 months ago).
A slight complication was that the evening before I was to fly out of HBA, I was to give the dinner speech to a national conference being held in Hobart - 260 people at $160/head!! That took a lot of preparation time, at the same time I was trying to remember what to pack (HLO).
Anyway, it all went OK and the HBA QP was for once uncrowded. On boarding, it turned out that Qantas put a business-configured B717 on the leg HBA-MEL. So 1E got me an OK seat, but only whY points and SCs, even though it was a J ticket.
One last way to screw me over, eh Alan?Off we go.
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