Review of Egyptair flight from Cairo to Aswan in Business

I work as a tour guide in Iceland and mid-December is one of the few very quiet times of the year – perfect time to travel. I was planning to go to Gambia with Royal Air Maroc but Morocco decided to cancel all flights to and from the country. I booked a Lufthansa flight from Paris to Cairo only four days before departure at a very reasonable rate of 550 € return in business class, and I had already booked a one-way flight from Paris to Budapest with Swiss. Here are all my flights:

Play, Keflavík to Paris, economy class
Lufthansa, Paris to Munich, business class
Lufthansa, Munich to Cairo, business class 
Egyptair, Cairo to Aswan, business class (here)
Egyptair, Aswan to Cairo, business class
Lufthansa, Cairo to Munich, business class
Lufthansa, Munich to Paris, business class
Swiss, Paris to Zurich, business class
Swiss, Zurich to Budapest, business class
Wizzair, Budapest to Keflavík, economy class (no flight report)

Aswan is the southernmost large city in Egypt with a population of about 1.5M and is a popular destination both for domestic and international tourists.

Travel time from Cairo to Aswan is about 13 hours by train or by car while flight time is only 1 hour and 25 minutes. There are five to eight direct flights a day. Most of them are operated by Egyptair although Nile Air and Air Arabia Egypt also have a few flights a week. The typical one-way fare is 69 € in economy and 118 € in business class - so there's a domestic business class with a relatively small price difference. Let's see if it's worth booking business class.

I took a Uber from my hotel in downtown Cairo to Terminal 3 of the airport. I paid about 150 EGP (about 9 €).

There's a security control before entering the terminal building as is the norm at airports in Egypt. Have your flight confirmation ready as you need to show it.

There were only two people in front of me at the business class check-in desk but I still had to wait about 10 minutes. At least 30 people for waiting at the economy class check-in desks and waiting time seemed to be at least half an hour - so I saved time here.

There's a business class lounge at the domestic part of the airport: let's go there.

It's a small room with only about 22 seats. All seats were taken when I entered. Some seats became available a few minutes later but then many other passengers came to the lounge who could not sit down. The lounge looked nice, was clean, there was free Wi-Fi, the employee working at the front desk was friendly but what's the lounge for if many passengers cannot sit down? There was anyway a very limited choice of soft drinks and packed industrial pastries. I couldn't take many photos as the lounge was full and the four employees kept looking. But here's a photo about the most interesting part of the food that was available.

Terminal 3 is reasonably modern and clean so it may be just a better option to skip the lounge.

There is a second security control at the gates at all airports in Egypt.

Priority boarding was available for business class passengers. There was a bus from the gate to the plane. It took 10 minutes to get there - it seemed that we went for a planeseeing tour of the airport. I didn't mind.

Egyptair often flies it's A220 planes on its domestic routes.

Configuration is 2+3. There's a business cabin with a movable divider similar to the intra-European business class of many airlines. But no seats are blocked here - so the seats in business class are exactly the same as in economy class.

The first row is called row 20. My seat was 20A, so it was basically seat 1A. Legroom in this row is similar to a bulkhead row of an A320 or B737.

Legroom in the other rows of business class is just the same as in economy class.

The seat was hard.

The divider was behind row 3 so there was a total of 15 seats in the business class cabin.

Boarding was completed at 14.00. An expected flight time of 1 hour and 15 minutes was announced. Push-back was at 14.05 for a scheduled departure time of 13.45.

Some of the planes seen during taxi:

Take-off was at 14.25 from runway 23C.

Views over the new neighborhoods near Cairo Airport:

A meal was served shortly after take-off. This business class meal was exactly what you'd expect in economy class: an industrial croissant, the Smallest Sandwich in the World and biscuits.

Water and fruit juice were offered.

Some nice views as we flew along the Nile:

The airport is south of Asswan. As runway 35 was the runway in use we had a view on the artificial lake of the Aswan High Dam before landing.

We landed at 15.30 for a scheduled arrival time of 15.10.

The arrival hall at Aswan Airport