Hi

Yes - I made arrangements with Memphis Tours (Mr Sherif) and I've highly recommended him on a number of forums I visit.

I live and work in Cyprus (originally from UK) and had always taken package tours on our previous trips to Luxor & Aswan.

However, this time we wanted to be a bit more adventurous and put together our own itinerary flying from Larnaca.

But - we did need to have certain parts of our trip confirmed in advance and it was for this that I was searching the internet when I came across Memphis Tours. We had flights already on hold from Larnaca to Cairo, then onwards to Aswan (or we could have done Luxor) - with our return flights coming back from Cairo. We wanted to arrange a 3 night Nile cruise, which we hadn't previously done.

I kept finding Nile cruises but nothing with the dates for the coming summer season and so I found Mr Sherif using his online Chat facility.

He provided me with an itinerary, prices and possibilities of 2 cruise companies for the following summer (2007), I was making my reservation towards the end of summer 2006.

We also wanted to have confirmed reservations on the overnight sleeper train from Luxor to Cairo. We had always done the "seated" option previously and thought it would be fun to do it a la Agatha Christie style with a designated sleeping compartment. We could have booked it through Seat61 but would have had to pay extra to get the tickets sent to us outside Egypt.

Mr Sherif was able to book all of the above for us - with a deposit of 25% of the cost per person. We paid no extra for the train journey - he quoted us exactly the same price as I had already seen advertised directly with the train company, Abela.

I arranged our flights, Mr Sherif sorted out the other stuff I'd asked and we made arrangements for his company representative in Aswan to meet us at our hotel the day after our arrival so we could collect and pay for the cruise and train tickets. The rep arrived at the appointed time, delivered our tickets, collected our cash (came back later in the day with our change) and left his contact number "just in case" and that was the last we saw of him. No hassle, no trying to sell us anything else....

I will certainly use Memphis Tours again because we will most definitely be heading back to Egypt (for the 8th visit) in the not too distant future
P.S. I also left feedback on his guest book too as he warned us about the hotel we had chosen in that he had received complaints from American tourists. He offered to move us to another hotel but, as we had been to Aswan before, we knew it to be too far from the main resort for the few days we would be based there and chose to stay. Although not until we had checked with Mr Sherif as to what the complaints were regarding - I wanted to be sure it wasn't cleanliness issues mainly. He said they had complained over "service" issues and after our first breakfast there, we could wholeheartedly agree It took over an hour each morning for us to place the same order of eggs, toast, fruit, yoghurt & croissants plus coffee for 4 people and for us to finish up eating. The fact that there were only another 2 or 3 couples eating at the same time made us wonder what on earth was happening in the kitchen

But rather than marr the holiday, it made all the more fun on guessing how long breafast would take the following morning

So, he was quite correct in warning us about that too

CwB

Thank you Cyprus. A detailed experience and a worthy recommendation.