On 28 November 2024 I was a guest speaker at MSA University's event Job Opportunities in Hospitality Industry, at the Faculty of Management Sciences. My session was called "E-Hospitality and Tourism: New Opportunities in the Job Market", as part of a panel of industry experts (MSA event report, archived copy).

I spoke about four things: how tourists search for a trip to Egypt, how they find tour companies online, what the numbers say about tourism in Egypt, and the role marketing plays in bringing visitors. The numbers below are updated to the latest available, so they are newer than the ones I showed on the day.

1. How a tourist searches for a trip to Egypt

Very few people book Egypt in one step. A trip usually moves through three stages:

1. Inspiration. A video, a photo or a friend's story puts Egypt on the list.
2. Research. The traveller searches Google, reads reviews, watches YouTube, asks on forums like Reddit — and now asks AI assistants like ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews.
3. Booking. More and more of this happens online. Phocuswright forecasts that online bookings will reach 65% of all travel bookings worldwide by 2026, up from 61% in 2023 (Phocuswright via TravTalk).

The research stage is where most of the decision is made. In my own study of 7,771 tourist reviews and posts about Egypt, travellers' most repeated advice to each other was practical: hire a licensed private guide, choose a small company that others recommend, and read recent reviews (the full study).

2. How tourists find tour companies online

When a traveller is ready to look for a company, they usually meet it in one of these places:

• Google Search and Google Maps — the company's website and its business profile with reviews.
• Review platforms such as Tripadvisor and Trustpilot.
• Travel marketplaces that list day tours and packages from many operators.
• Social media — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
• AI answers — a question to ChatGPT or Google AI that names a few companies as sources (what GEO is).

3. Tourism in Egypt, in numbers

• Egypt received over 13 million tourists in 2019, fell to 3.7 million in 2020, and recovered to 14.9 million in 2023 (Egyptian Streets).
• 2024 was a record at 15.7 million tourists (same source).
• 2025 set a new record: about 19 million according to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, 21% more than 2024 (Business Today Egypt); the Prime Minister gave the figure as 18.8 million (Amwal Al Ghad).
• Tourism revenue reached $15.3 billion in 2024, compared with $7.2 billion in 2014, according to a Cabinet report (Business Today Egypt).

4. The role of marketing

Marketing works at two levels.

The country level. The state markets Egypt as a destination, and more and more of that work is digital. In July 2025 the Ministry of Tourism launched a digital campaign aimed at Arab travellers with the travel platform Wego (Amwal Al Ghad). Its Ramadan 2026 campaign relied heavily on Meta, Google and TikTok, and worked with bloggers, influencers and content creators (Ahram Online).

The company level. Once a traveller has chosen Egypt, the country's campaign has done its job — now each company has to be found and trusted. That means a website that ranks on Google and gets cited by AI, honest reviews, and a team that answers fast.

What this means for jobs

That was the real point of the session for the students in the room: every stage above is a job. Digital tourism needs people who can do:

• SEO and GEO — getting a company found on Google, Bing and in AI answers.
• Content — writing trip pages, guides and itineraries that answer real questions, in more than one language.
• Paid advertising — Google Ads and Meta campaigns for specific markets.
• Social media and video.
• Online reputation — answering reviews and complaints.
• Data and analytics — knowing which page and which channel brings real bookings.

Tourism in Egypt is growing, and more of it is decided online every year. The jobs are moving to where the decisions are made.

Sources

1. MSA University — Job Opportunities in Hospitality Industry (event report), archived copy.
2. TravTalk — Online travel bookings expected to dominate with 65% global reservations by 2026: Phocuswright, 25 September 2024.
3. Egyptian Streets — Egypt Sees Record 15.7 Million Tourists in 2024, Aims for 18 Million in 2025, 3 January 2025.
4. Business Today Egypt — Egypt sets new tourism record with 19M visitors in 2025, January 2026.
5. Amwal Al Ghad — Egypt welcomed 18.8 million tourists in 2025: PM, January 2026.
6. Business Today Egypt — Egypt's tourism revenues reach $15.3 billion in 2024.
7. Amwal Al Ghad — Egypt launches digital tourism campaign in partnership with WEGO, 16 July 2025.
8. Ahram Online — 'Ramadan in Egypt is a Story': Egypt launches campaign to boost tourism during Ramadan.

Tour companies in Egypt usually assume tourists complain about prices and shopping stops. I wanted to check that against what tourists actually write, so I collected and coded 7,771 items — tour reviews, Reddit posts and comments, YouTube videos and comments, travel blogs and official travel advice — from 2023 to 2026. 3,437 of them were about a real problem or worry.

The short answer: with a tour company, the biggest complaints are reliability and support after booking, not price. Travelling independently, the biggest worry is safety and harassment — but most of it is worry, not something that happened.

How the study was done

Every item was coded against a fixed list of 97 codes, so anyone can recount the numbers. A second, independent coding of part of the sample agreed with the first at F1 = 0.76 for reviews and 0.82 for social posts. In practice that means differences of 5 points or more are solid; smaller ones are not.

With a tour company: reliability beats price

I looked at 643 reviews rated 1 to 3 stars. Grouped, the complaints look like this:

The single problems mentioned most:

1. Itinerary changed or stops skipped — 17%
2. Forced shopping stop — 17%
3. Late or missing pickup — 15%
4. Rushed guide — 14%
5. Guide with little knowledge — 14%
6. Pressure to buy in a commission shop — 11%
7. Hidden fees — 10%

Shopping stops are the most common single complaint in 2- and 3-star reviews. But 1-star reviews tell a different story: the angriest reviews are about a pickup that came late or never came (24% of them) and a complaint nobody answered (17%), followed by slow replies and refund disputes (12% each). Tourists forgive a shopping stop more easily than being ignored.

One more number worth knowing: 114 low-rated reviews (18%) praise the guide by name and still give a low score because of something else — the itinerary, the money or the support. A friendly guide does not save a trip that the office lets down.

Travelling independently: worry comes first

Among 1,015 items from independent travellers:

Safety is the biggest concern, but of 136 general safety mentions only 20 described something that actually happened. The incidents that did happen were more ordinary: persistent hassle from sellers (64), sellers who would not take no (48), foreigner pricing (34), visa and airport arrival (33), Uber problems (31) and taxi fares (25).

Women travellers were the group with the clearest difference: 43% of their items mention general safety worry and 29% harassment.

What tourists say actually works

From their own advice, most-mentioned first:

• A firm "no, thank you" and ignoring sellers — 118 mentions
• A private, licensed guide — 97
• A private driver instead of a group tour — 53
• Asking the hotel — 42
• A small, recommended company — 24
• Going early — 24

And with companies, what makes people happy: an excellent guide (357 mentions), hospitality (257), good organisation and punctuality (207), and feeling looked after (112).

What a tour company can fix first

If I ran a tour company's website and operations, these are the first things the data points to:

1. Pickup: a written pickup time, the driver's name and number the day before, and what happens if they are late.
2. Itinerary: every stop with its time, and any change sent in writing.
3. Shopping: say clearly whether there are shopping stops — and only promise "no shopping stops" if it is true.
4. Money: what is included and what is not, as amounts, plus one plain line about tipping.
5. Support: who answers, how fast, how to complain and how refunds work. This is the 40% of 1-star reviews.

Most bad reviews here are not about Egypt. They are about a promise the company made and did not keep.

Limits of the study

• Complaint bias: low ratings dominate the review sample; only about 260 positive reviews were analysed.
• Cairo and Giza heavy: 438 of the 643 low-rated reviews. Luxor, Aswan and the Red Sea need their own study.
• Missing platforms: Viator, GetYourGuide, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were not included.
• Older travellers: only 25 items — too few for any conclusion.
• No company names are used, and no reviews are quoted word for word.

Sources

Where the data came from (all items from 2023 to 2026):

1. Tour and company reviews from Tripadvisor (53 tour products), Google Maps (17 companies) and Trustpilot (5 companies), collected through the DataForSEO reviews API.
2. Reddit posts and comments, collected from the Arctic Shift public Reddit archive.
3. YouTube: auto-generated subtitles and top comments from 79 videos about travelling in Egypt.
4. Travel blogs, forums and news: 337 points from about 118 pages.
5. Official travel advice (104 points from 19 pages), including:
   • UK Foreign Office — Egypt travel advice
   • Government of Canada — Travel advice for Egypt
   • German Federal Foreign Office — Egypt safety advice (in German)
   • New Zealand SafeTravel — Egypt
   • US CDC — Travelers' health: Egypt
   • Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities — tourist hotline 19654

The full coded dataset — the list of 97 codes and every item with its link — is kept on file. Percentages are my own counts from that dataset.

Search used to mean ten blue links. Today a traveller can ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews or Copilot "what's the best way to see Luxor in two days?" and get one written answer, with a handful of sources underneath it. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the work of becoming one of those sources.

The name comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, which tested ways of changing web content and found they could raise a source's visibility in AI answers by up to 40% — with results that varied by topic (arXiv, 2023).

SEO and GEO side by side

GEO does not replace SEO. Google says plainly that there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page only has to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet (Google Search Central). So the technical SEO work underneath stays the same.

What tends to get a page cited

1. One clear answer near the top. A page that answers the question in its first paragraph is easier to quote than one that builds up to it.
2. Facts stated plainly. Numbers, dates, prices and names written as full sentences, not buried in images.
3. Structure the machine can read. Real headings, lists, tables, and structured data that describes the page (Google's introduction to structured data).
4. Being reachable. OpenAI uses separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for training, and a site can allow one while blocking the other (OpenAI). And the page should not depend on JavaScript: an analysis by Vercel found that none of the major AI crawlers it tested render JavaScript, ChatGPT's and Claude's among them (Vercel).

The question to ask of every page is: if an assistant quoted one sentence from it, which sentence would that be — and is it true?

Where to start

Start with the pages that already bring enquiries from Google. They are already indexed and trusted; GEO is mostly about making their answers easier to lift.

Sources

1. Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K. and Deshpande, A. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv, 2023.
2. Google Search Central — AI features and your website.
3. Google Search Central — Introduction to structured data markup.
4. OpenAI — Overview of OpenAI crawlers.
5. Vercel — The rise of the AI crawler.