Winter Sun in El Gouna

Why this privately built town is not the Egypt you are picturing, a closer look at The Chedi El Gouna, and the reason you really do not need an all inclusive here.

There comes a point every winter, usually somewhere around the middle of January, when the sky has been the same colour for three weeks and you would give almost anything for an afternoon that requires sunglasses. The problem with that feeling is that most of the genuinely hot places are a very long way away. The Caribbean is nine hours. The Maldives is longer. Dubai is respectable but it is not exactly a secret any more.

Which brings me to El Gouna, a place I find myself recommending more and more.

First, what El Gouna actually is

This is the part that surprises people, because when I say Egypt most minds go straight to a hotel strip outside Hurghada with a buffet and a towel on a sunbed at seven in the morning.

El Gouna is not that at all. It is a town, and a privately built one. Samih Sawiris began developing it in 1989 on an empty stretch of Red Sea coast about twenty kilometres north of Hurghada, and what exists now runs to roughly ten kilometres of coastline and around twenty islands, all threaded together by lagoons and low arched bridges. The whole thing was designed rather than allowed to happen. The architecture is deliberately low and sand coloured and domed, so nothing towers over anything else, and the water runs through the middle of it all like a series of canals.

It is owned and run by Orascom Development, which means the roads, the security, the utilities and the services all belong to the same operation. There is a hospital with twenty four hour emergency care and what the town describes as the largest hyperbaric chamber in the Middle East, which tells you something about how seriously the diving is taken here. There are international schools, a co-working space, two marinas, a golf course and an annual film festival. People live here. That is the bit that changes the feel of it entirely.

You get around by tuk-tuk, by little shuttle boat across the lagoons, or on foot, because it is flat and compact and genuinely walkable. There is a Downtown with a main street and palm trees and shops. There is Abu Tig Marina where the yachts sit and the evening happens. There is Zeytouna Beach, which has an island to itself.

The weather, which is the entire point

El Gouna sits in a stretch of desert that sees something in the region of five millimetres of rain in a year. Not five millimetres a month. Five millimetres in twelve months. You are not going to lose a day to weather. Here is what the winter actually looks like.

• November: highs of 26 degrees, lows of 18, sea at 26

• December: highs of 22 degrees, lows of 14, sea at 24

• January: highs of 21 degrees, lows of 12, sea at 23

• February: highs of 22 degrees, lows of 13, sea at 22

• March: highs of 25 degrees, lows of 16, sea at 22

  
  

A few honest notes on those numbers. December and January are warm rather than hot, and the evenings genuinely cool down, so you want a jumper for dinner and you will be glad of it. The sea, though, stays remarkably kind all the way through. Swimming in twenty three degree water in the third week of January is a very particular kind of pleasure when you know what everyone at home is doing.

There is also wind here, consistently, which is the other reason people come. Winter brings something in the order of twenty to twenty five knots, and El Gouna has quietly become one of the better kitesurfing destinations in the world because of it. If you are somebody who wants to lie completely still for seven days, pick your beach carefully and you will be perfectly happy. If you have ever fancied learning to kite, this is a very good place to do it badly for the first time.

On safety, which is the question everybody actually wants answered

The Foreign Office does advise against travel to parts of Egypt, and it is worth knowing which parts. As things stand it advises against all travel to the North Sinai Governorate and to within twenty kilometres of the border with Libya. It advises against all but essential travel to the northern part of South Sinai beyond the St Catherine to Nuweibaa road, to the Ismailiyah Governorate east of the Suez Canal, to much of the Western Desert with a long list of exceptions, and to the Hala'ib Triangle and the Bir Tawil Trapezoid.

El Gouna is in none of them. It sits on the mainland Red Sea coast in the Red Sea Governorate, well north of Hurghada and a very long way from anywhere the advice covers. The advice is far more specific than the shorthand people carry around in their heads, and that shorthand tends to flatten an entire country into one idea.

That said, two things matter. Advice changes, so check gov.uk before you book and again before you fly, and remember that travelling against Foreign Office advice can invalidate your insurance. And no destination anywhere is risk free, which is true of Egypt and equally true of a city break in Europe.

What I would add on top of that is the practical layer. You are not arriving into a large unfamiliar city and finding your own way. You land at Hurghada, you are met, and about half an hour later you are inside a self contained town with its own security, its own hospital and its own everything else. For a lot of my clients, and particularly for families and for people travelling alone, that structure is the whole reason El Gouna works where the rest of Egypt feels like more of a decision.

Hotel spotlight: The Chedi El Gouna

If you know the Chedi name you already have a reasonable idea of what you are walking into. It belongs to GHM, the group behind the Chedi properties in Switzerland, Montenegro and Qatar, and the house style is a very particular sort of restraint. Nothing shouts. Everything is considered.

This one opened in December 2022, built on the bones of an older hotel called the Bellevue, and it is small in the way that makes a real difference to a stay. Eighty two rooms and suites, and you feel that number in how quiet it is.

The rooms

The look is Asian influenced and deliberately calm, all neutral and earthy tones with a lot of texture and very little clutter. Egyptian cotton with a serious thread count, marble vanities with two basins so nobody is negotiating over a sink, big walk in showers, and an espresso machine in the room, which is a small thing that I notice every single time. The beachfront rooms sit close enough to the sand that you can hear it from bed.

The food

Three places to eat, which for eighty two rooms is generous. The Restaurant does breakfast through to dinner with the sea in front of you. Nihon is up on the roof doing Japanese and pan-Asian, and it is the one you book for your best night. The Beach House handles the daytime with salads and sandwiches and seafood until six. There is also a lounge bar with a cigar list, if that is your evening.

The spa and the rest of it

The spa runs to four single treatment suites and two for couples, with hammam and a proper relaxation area, done in sandstone and marble. There is a twenty four hour gym with Technogym kit and a separate yoga studio running scheduled classes. Two pools with Bali beds. A private beach running to two hundred and fifty metres with calm water, lifeguards and paddleboards and kayaks to take out.

It suits couples beautifully and it works for families too, though it is not a resort built around a kids' club, and if a kids' club is what your holiday needs I would put you somewhere else in El Gouna instead.

Why you do not need an all inclusive here

This is the argument I find myself making most often, and it is the reason El Gouna rewards a bit of thought.

An all inclusive is a perfectly sensible answer to a resort that stands alone in the middle of nowhere. If the only food for twenty miles is inside your hotel, then yes, pay for it up front and stop thinking about it. That is genuinely the right call in plenty of places.

El Gouna is the opposite situation. There is a town out there with an actual restaurant scene, spread across Downtown, Abu Tig Marina, Fanadir Marina and the beaches, and it runs the whole way from a hot dog counter to proper waterfront dining. There is Italian and Egyptian and Asian and Middle Eastern, there are cafes and there are late bars, and getting to any of it costs you a few pounds in a tuk-tuk.

So if you book all inclusive you have effectively paid twice for dinner and then given yourself a reason not to leave. You spend the week inside one property in a town specifically designed to be wandered through, which seems to me like a waste of both the town and the money.

My honest counterpoint, because there is one. If you are travelling with children who eat constantly and unpredictably, or you want the budget fixed before you leave home with no surprises, all inclusive still earns its place and I would never talk you out of it. It is a question of what kind of week you actually want rather than one option being better than the other.

For most of the couples and the smaller groups I send here, though, bed and breakfast is the answer. You eat at the hotel when you cannot be bothered to move, and you go out when you can, and the food becomes part of the holiday instead of a thing you queue for.

What else fills a week

The diving and snorkelling are the headline, and the reefs off this stretch of coast are the reason the hospital has that hyperbaric chamber. Kitesurfing and windsurfing, for the reasons above. Golf, on a championship course. Lagoon cruises and catamaran days. Desert trips out into the sand behind the town. And a genuinely good evening scene around the marina that does not require you to be twenty three.

There is also the option of doing very little at all, which in the third week of January is a perfectly respectable plan.

Getting there

Hurghada is the airport, and it is easier than most people expect. TUI, easyJet, Jet2 and Wizz Air all fly direct from the UK, with roughly five and three quarter hours in the air from Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol, and around six from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Jet2 is adding routes from seven more airports from February 2027, so the access is only getting better.

From the airport it is about half an hour by road into El Gouna. No connections, no internal flights, no long transfer at the end of a long day.

Who this is for

El Gouna suits you if you want reliable winter heat without a long haul flight, if you like the idea of a town rather than a compound, if you would rather eat in six different places than one, and if the idea of somewhere self contained and well run appeals more than somewhere you have to navigate.

It suits you less if you want a huge waterpark resort, or if your heart is set on the pyramids, because that is a different trip entirely and Cairo is a long way north of here.

If it sounds like your kind of January, send me a message and tell me roughly when you are thinking and who you are travelling with. I can usually tell within a couple of questions whether El Gouna is right for you, and if it is not, I will say so and suggest somewhere that is.

Foreign Office advice for Egypt is available at gov.uk and was correct at the time of writing. Please check it before booking and again before you travel.