Egypt vs Jordan-help please?
 

I am trying to get a last minute vacation together for my family of four(traveling with two grown children ages 24 and 27) during the Christmas holiday season this year.(I recently lost my mom and would like to go somewhere during Christmas to "get away ").There are not many threads that are recent on Jordan and am wanting some feedback.

Our entire family has always wanted to go to Egypt and do Cairo, Alexandria along with a Nile cruise or tour. However, the flights to Amman Jordan are working out better for us.
Questions-should we just go to Amman and do Petra,etc.? OR try and include both into a vacation? How many days would you allow for each country if given two weeks? Ideally,it would be better for us to fly in and out of Amman so am wondering if doing a secondary trip (on our own) to Cairo would be feasible? Am I nuts to try and plan this all by myself?
Thanks for your help!

You can certainly do 5/days* in Jordan and then fly to CAI for 6-7/days* visit to Egypt. There are flights between AMM and CAI and return to AMM, which would have to be added to your intl fare.

*this is allowing for any inter-country travel, so can add/delete as needed.

I believe there was a recent thread by someone who visited both countries using a tour operator in Cairo to handle the arrangements - flights, meet/greet, hotels, sightseeing, Nile cruise, etc.

I used Lady Egypt for my Egypt/Jordan tour. They are very good at customizing a plan for what you need. I spent about 9 days in Egypt and 5 days in Jordan. It was a wonderful trip and I do recommend visiting both countries.

Thanks P_M for stepping in. I thought it was you, but didn't want to mention the name of the tour operator if not certain.

As P_M knows, I also used Lady Egypt to plan our tour of Egypt in summer of '08 for my DH and myself, and 4 20-something children (2 our's plus 2 friends). We thought they were excellent - very communicative (all by email -- in fact, the first time I talked to anyone from the company was when we missed our connection in Frankfurt and I called to tell them we wouldn't arrive on schedule). The one head's up, however, is that they (with our concurrence, but I wouldn't do it again) had us staying out in Giza -- the hotel was nice, Le Meridien Pyradmids -- but given the choice, I would stay closer to downtown (the on-the-river hotels someone mentioned in the other thread). Their "service" was excellent - they handled all the logistics of tours, hotel checkin and check out, luggage, transportation, tour guide, etc. FWIW, we are NOT tour people. I'm not sure I've been on a tour with a tour guide more than once in my life before; we prefer in most places to just get out an walk by ourselves with only a general guideline to what we want to see. Egypt just seemed a little more daunting.

I also did an Egypt/Jordan tour - used a company called STI - and found 16 days to be enough time. In 2 weeks you could certainly do both countries.

STI has several Egypt packages with add-ons to other countries. They provided all transfers, air within Egypt and to Jordan. Thought they did an excellent job & at a great price.