Money
 

We're only going to be in Cairo for 2 days, our tour from the ship is paid onboard; is U.S. dollars accepted or should I bring Egypt pounds?
Thanks,

For a short visit that's mostly pre-paid I would just go with dollars. You will be able to use dollars in most tourist places around Cairo.

While you can probably pay for many purchases with USD, I would suggest getting some Egyptian pounds, for 2 main reasons...

You will want to tip in Egyptian pounds (1-3 pounds for various things). Right now, $1 is about 5LE, so handing out $1 bills is WAY overtipping, which will result in people hounding you to do things for you.

You may also have more bargaining power with Egyptian Pounds since the merchants will have to pay an exchange fee to convert the USD to LE.

Have a great trip!

Thanks all; will get some Pounds and also bring U.S. Dollars....

Good idea to bring both, but I wouldn't get pounds in advance as it's too expensive to exchange currency in the US. I used the ATM machines in Egypt but I found the Egyptian banks give a fair exchange too, which isn't the case in many other countries.

Be sure to keep plenty of small change such as 1 and 5 pound notes. And bring hand sanitizer as the bills in Egypt are kind of nasty. ;-) Grcxx3 makes a good point about tipping, as most public bathroom attendants will expect 1 pound.

I wouldn't bring pounds from the US. I would use my ATM card there. It was by far the easiest and quickest way to exchange currency.

If you are shopping before you happen to find an ATM, you can negotiate in dollars, in fact you'll find many merchants deliberatly switch currencies when they are haggling with you (to their advantage) so stay sharp which currecny you are barganing in. The only thing they don't like is coins. They can't exchange those.

I always found it very difficult to get the smaller bills. So I kept some one dollar bills handy. I always hate to over pay (tip), but in the grand total of Egypt it probably ran me 2 or 3 dollars more. And I was there 14 days.