A few Cairo volunteers, one stubborn idea: an honest guide to Egypt that costs nothing.

How the project started

QuickPass began over the winter of 2021–22 as a shared document between five friends in Cairo, each of whom kept being asked the same questions by visiting relatives and friends from abroad. Which museum is worth the time? Is the Tutankhamun supplement worth it? When does Karnak open and how do you avoid the buses? Should you buy the camera ticket? After answering the same questions by email a dozen times, the obvious thing was to write the answers down once, properly, and put them somewhere anyone could read them. The first note — the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir — went online in March 2022. By the end of that year there were thirty notes and a few hundred readers a month.

The guide grew by word of mouth and by the slow accumulation of re-walked notes. By 2024 the archive had crossed eighty notes and the small group of founders had been joined by two more volunteers. The project registered as a non-profit cultural association that year, mostly so that it could hold the small running fund transparently and accept the occasional reader donation without it being a personal payment to one of us. As of the spring 2026 rota the guide carries 106 free notes across 32 sites and institutions, and is read by something over forty thousand people a month, most of them in the weeks before a trip to Egypt.

We have kept the project small on purpose. A larger operation would need revenue, and revenue in travel publishing almost always means advertising, affiliate commission or sponsored placements — the exact things that made the existing free information untrustworthy in the first place. By staying small and volunteer-run, we keep the guide honest. The cost of that decision is that we cannot cover everything; the benefit is that everything we do cover, we cover without a conflict of interest.

The rules we hold to

The project runs on five standing rules. They are the rules that decide what notes we write and what we refuse to do. Holding to them costs the guide the revenue that a commercial site would take for granted. We think they are the whole point.

1. We walk it ourselves. Every note is based on a visit by a QuickPass volunteer who bought an ordinary ticket and walked the place during the published hours. We do not write about places we have not visited.
2. We buy our own tickets. No press passes, no comped entry, no organised familiarisation trips, no VIP access. The cost of the visit comes out of the running fund, not from the site.
3. No commission, no affiliates, no sponsorship. There is no link on this site that pays us when a reader books or buys anything. No tour operator, hotel, cruise company or ticket reseller has any financial relationship with the guide.
4. No advertising. The site carries no display advertising, no native advertising, no sponsored notes. It is funded by the running fund and the occasional reader donation, both described openly on the funding page.
5. We say so when it is not worth it. The guide says when a supplement is overpriced, when a site is unpleasant in a given month, when a tour is a waste of money. We have no reason to soften any of it, because no one pays us to be kind.

The volunteers

QuickPass is written by a small group of Cairo-based volunteers. None of us is paid by a tour operator or a hotel, and the running fund does not pay salaries. Notes are signed at the foot with the volunteer's initials. The group has been roughly stable since 2024, with a couple of people joining to re-walk the Luxor and Aswan sites that the original Cairo group could not reach as often.

What the project will not do

It is sometimes clearer to say what we refuse. QuickPass does not, and will not, organise tours, sell tickets, broker hotel reservations, take affiliate commission from any booking platform, accept advertising in any form, run sponsored notes, take press trips, accept comped access, or license the QuickPass name to any commercial business. Every one of these has been offered to us at least once since 2022 — usually politely, occasionally with real money attached — and refused each time. The refusals are not posturing. They are the only way a free guide stays worth reading.

We also do not publish in languages other than English at the moment. There are good Arabic and French heritage resources written by people who live in those languages, and translating QuickPass properly would need a parallel volunteer effort we do not yet have. If a reader wants to help translate the core notes into another language as a volunteer, we would happily talk; it is on the wish-list rather than the roadmap.

A short timeline

• Winter 2021–22Five Cairo friends start a shared document answering the questions visiting relatives keep asking.
• March 2022The first note — the Egyptian Museum, Tahrir — goes online. A few hundred readers a month by year end, thirty notes written.
• 2023The note format settles — opening hours, ticket breakdown, the verdict, the side door, the re-walk date. The archive crosses sixty notes.
• 2024The project registers as a non-profit cultural association. Tamer joins to cover Luxor and Aswan; Salma joins to run fact-checking.
• 2025The archive crosses one hundred notes. Reader donations cover the running fund for the first time without the founders topping it up.
• Spring 2026106 notes across 32 sites, re-walked on the published rota, read by something over forty thousand people a month.

Why we keep it free

The most common question we get is why we do not simply charge a small subscription and pay ourselves for the work. The honest answer is that the moment money enters, the incentives change. A paid guide has to keep subscribers happy, which over time means softening the hard verdicts and chasing the popular sites rather than the worthwhile ones. A guide funded by advertising has to keep advertisers happy, which is worse. A guide on affiliate commission has a reason to push the bookings that pay the most, not the ones that serve the reader. We have watched all three failure modes play out across travel publishing, and the only structure we trust to stay honest is the one where no one is paying us to say anything in particular.

Keeping the guide free is therefore not generosity — it is the design that protects the thing that makes the guide useful. The running fund is small and transparent, the volunteers are unpaid, and the notes are written by people who would walk these sites anyway because they love them. If that ever stops being sustainable we will say so plainly on the funding page rather than quietly compromising the independence. So far, six years in, it has held.